


Here Comes Your Man

by hollycomb



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Arranged Marriage, Awkward First Times, Dark Magic, Dubious Consent, M/M, Original Clans (Warriors)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:01:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 42,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7312384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb/pseuds/hollycomb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At twenty-two years of age, the only son of Brendol the Fierce is married to the son of Queen Organa. The Western Prince is a hulking brute who is rumored to have fearsome magical powers, and Hux is prepared to do what he must to help his people hold their own against the threat of these powers. He's less prepared to feel quickly desirous and even protective of the warrior Prince Kylo Ren, who is secretly enthralled by a mysterious mentor who both bolsters and threatens to destroy his apprentice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Note the dub-con tag/warning** that goes along with any arranged marriage situation! Hux is quickly attached to Kylo in this, but the marriage wasn't his idea.
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> **

Hux first lays eyes on his intended in the neutral zone, deep in the northern woods, at the foot of the mountains that mark the edge of the territory Hux’s family will now share with these barbarians from the west. It’s snowing, and no one from the western tribe is dressed for the weather. The so-called Prince of so-called Alderaan, a dead city that Hux’s people burned when Hux was still a baby, is shirtless and looks like he’s dressed for combat rather than a grim marriage ceremony on a snowy plain. His parents stand behind him, and behind them are ten guards in mismatched armor, unpolished. None look happy to be here, and Hux knows that his own expression, and those of everyone in his traveling party, mirrors this stony resignation at best.

He was warned that the Prince is over-large, but seeing him up close is still frightening, though Hux nearly comes eye to eye with him in height. In the western kingdom, everyone hunts and fights, even those who pass for royalty there, and the Prince looks like he’s been training to kill with his bare hands since infancy: he’s broad, muscled and hulking, with the glittering eyes of a hothead. Hux tries to meet the heat of his gaze with answering coolness. The Prince looks Hux over with hungry interest, then mutters something to his mother in their language. Hux doesn’t speak it, and he’s also been warned that the Prince doesn’t speak a word of even the Basic Eastern.

Hux’s father exchanges a tense greeting with the Western Queen. She has very long hair that is wrapped in braids around her proud head, as if the hair itself stands in for a crown. There is no king in their culture when the royal line descends from the mother’s side, and the man who stands to the right of the Prince must be what they call the ‘royal father,’ a term that sent Brendol the Fierce into a rare fit of laughter when his advisors first shared it with him. Hux flushes with renewed shame when he considers that he will be bound to this family from now on: their simple manners, their strange customs and dishonorable history. It’s politically necessary, and Hux didn’t dare protest when his father broke the news of the arrangement, but his knees are shaking under his heavy outercoat when he takes his marriage vows. The Prince answers the questions asked by the officiant only in affirmative grunts. He’s referred to as Kylo Ren during the ceremony, not Prince Organa, and Hux supposes this is how he should think of his new husband, though the name is almost too ridiculous and foreign to bear, like all of this.

Hux’s mother hugs him for a long time after the ceremony. She’s frightened for him, shaking. Hux tries to reassure her, promising that he’ll be fine in the western fort where he’ll reside with this barbarian who is somehow now his husband. He can’t lie to his mother: she sees through his false confidence and weeps as Brendol nudges Hux away, toward the family that Hux is now supposed to consider his own. Hux hasn’t looked any of the western people in the eye since before the ceremony began, and he’s embarrassed when they indicate that he should climb onto the black horse that Kylo Ren rode in on. To Hux, the idea of two men sharing a horse is obscene, even if they are married. Kylo grows impatient with Hux’s confused hesitation and grabs him by the waist, lifting him onto the horse before climbing up behind him. The Queen says something that sounds like an admonishment. Kylo sniffs-- laughing? --and spurs the horse to a trot, reaching around Hux to grab the reins.

Though he should be freezing in this weather, Kylo’s chest feels very warm against Hux’s back. Hux has heard rumors that the western Prince is a magic person, capable of monstrous enchantments that have accounted for the rise of his once nearly wiped-out people. Hux swallows his useless trepidation and holds on to the front of the saddle, telling himself again that he’s willing to do anything to secure the future of his own people, who will use this apparent gesture of peacemaking to dominate the barbarians once and for all, when the time is right.

Hux doesn’t allow himself to wonder what will have become of him by then.

The weather grows milder as they travel west, and Hux’s eyelids begin to feel heavy at sundown. Kylo Ren has been silent for the entire journey, riding at the head of the party, only two of the guards flanking his horse. Kylo wore his sword strapped to his back during the marriage ceremony, and he wears it now. Hux lets his eyes drift shut and imagines what would happen if they were attacked on the road. He envisions Kylo leaping off the horse and into battle, spilling blood. Hux always wanted to learn how to fight, but it wasn’t fitting a person of his station in the east. He has two daggers under his coat, one from each parent. A traditional wedding gift. He imagines aiding in a fight with these weapons, surprising his husband and his in-laws with his skill. It’s a mere fantasy; he would be lost in combat. Falling asleep, he allows himself to wish that this weren’t true, and imagines Kylo Ren teaching him how to fight and smiling in approval at the sight of Hux drawing blood from their enemies.

Hux wakes with a start when his head tips forward. He’s disoriented, and briefly terrified before he remembers to only be grimly resigned. Kylo shifts the reins into his left hand and tugs Hux against him with his right arm, securing him in place. Hux struggles to stay awake for the remainder of the journey, though he’s tempted at moments to let his head fall back onto Kylo’s sturdy shoulder.

They reach a modest village at nightfall. Surely, Hux thinks, this cannot be where the royal family resides. Surely it is only a stopover. The village has been decorated in preparation for their arrival: thick ribbons twist around lantern posts and flower petals are scattered along a path that leads to what Hux must presume is a wedding night hut. Kylo brings Hux inside, holding his hand as they cross the threshold. It’s more of a house than a hut, with multiple rooms and even a small kitchen, though it doesn’t look like anything so substantial from the outside. When the front door is shut behind them, Hux keeps close to Kylo in the dark, watching him light candles without use of a match.

“So you are a magic person,” Hux says.

Kylo turns to him with a look of suspicion, apparently not magic enough to understand a foreign language. Hux squares his shoulders when Kylo moves closer, his heartbeat thudding at the hollow of his throat and seeming to want to climb onto his tongue. Kylo looks dangerous in the flickering light from the candles, but when he stands before Hux his eyes don’t seem as hard or as angry as they did in the presence of his family. Hux exhales through his nose, holding in a protest when Kylo knocks Hux’s wool cap off as if it offends him. Kylo mumbles something in the western tongue and runs his fingers through Hux’s hair, disordering it. Hux supposes he might never have seen this shade of hair in the west. It’s relatively rare even in the east.

Not wanting to be passively pawed at, Hux puts his hand on Kylo’s chest and runs his fingertips down to his stomach. Kylo’s body is intimidating but not excessive, his bulkiest muscles tapering down to a trim waist, and soon Hux is touching him with both hands, pausing to press his palm over Kylo’s heartbeat. Hux teases one stiff nipple, enjoying Kylo’s sharp intake of breath. Kylo wears only a heavy belt and tight pants, armored boots. There are leather bands circling his powerful arms, and Hux runs his fingers over those, too, noting that Kylo is looming more densely into Hux’s personal space, their hips almost pressed together as Kylo’s breath warms Hux’s face. Hux tries to keep his own breathing under control when Kylo pushes off his outercoat, Hux’s wedding-gift daggers clattering to the floor along with it.

Kylo says something: a string of five blunt words, pronounced gravely. Hux can’t translate but feels as if he understands anyway: _I’m going to fuck you_ , or _We’re going to bed now_ , or something like that. Kylo takes hold of Hux’s hair again, pulling until Hux’s chin is tipped upward, Kylo’s face hovering over his. Hux waits to feel intimidated by this attempt at physical dominance, and he's only partly surprised to find that he’s mostly thrilled by the challenge. Between the eastern people’s almost universal fear of Brendol the Fierce and Hux’s mother’s tendency to hover protectively, he rarely ever got to even tussle in a play fight as a boy. There’s always been something in him that has wanted this: rough treatment, a fearless opponent who underestimates him, a big hand in his hair. He reaches for Kylo’s belt, looking for the clasp. Kylo smells good; Hux noticed that on the journey here. It’s a warm, waxy smell, like polished wood.

Hux laughs when Kylo licks his cheek. He’s never been licked before, not even by an actual animal. Kylo tugs Hux’s hair in warning and narrows his eyes, then leans down to lick Hux from the base of his throat and up to his jaw. It’s an overwhelming, possessive, arousing sensation. Hux is still trying to figure out how to get Kylo’s belt off. They’re walking backward, slowly, toward the bed in the next room. Hux has been dreading the inevitable arrival of this moment since the announcement of the engagement, but something about the ride here made him almost want it. More than almost, he realizes, when he sighs in relief as Kylo grabs his wrists and pulls his hands around to the clasp at the back of his belt, showing him how to undo it.

In the bedroom, they both work on their own boots, watching each other. Hux is sitting on the bed, Kylo on a low stool in the corner. Hux has many layers to remove but Kylo is quickly naked, standing up to show Hux his imposing erection before crossing to the bed to yank at Hux’s remaining clothes. With every piece that’s removed, Hux feels smaller but somehow less scared. He feels like Kylo has transformed him into a true barbarian already, like his own pounding heartbeat is a war drum he never knew he held within him, goading him toward reckless action. Hux’s plan had been to hide under the blankets while opening his legs for the necessarily deed, but now he lets Kylo spread him out atop the bedcovers and look at him, Hux’s chest heaving as he surveys Kylo’s naked body with the same greedy interest.

Hux leaves his palms pressed to the mattress when Kylo touches him, too absorbed in the feeling of being explored to do any touching of his own. Kylo’s hands feel enormous and very warm, moving from Hux’s ankles and up along his calves, pressing Hux’s legs open as he squeezes the soft insides of his thighs. Kylo drags his thumb over Hux’s balls and smirks when Hux moans for him, his legs inching open a bit wider for the feeling. Hux is very red now, from his face down to his chest, but he doesn’t mind Kylo seeing, though at home getting red in public was torture. _This is my husband_ , Hux thinks, when Kylo fondles Hux’s hard dick with his big barbarian hand. _He might as well see everything_.

When Kylo lowers his head, Hux thinks he might get his cock sucked before Kylo breaches him, which is something Hux has barely dared to dream of receiving even from a grunting barbarian. Instead, Kylo bites at the skin on Hux’s stomach, making him curl up defensively. Kylo pushes Hux’s shoulders back to the mattress and then licks over the mark he left on Hux’s pale skin, soothing him back into a breathy, twitching surrender.

“Don’t bite me,” Hux says, though it didn’t really hurt. Kylo moves up to suck at Hux’s nipples in response, which makes Hux laugh, because it tickles and because Kylo is rather determined in this, as if he expects to be able to drink from them. Kylo gives Hux a dark look for his laughter and growls under his breath when he surges up to lick and nip at Hux’s neck, drawing stuttering gasps from Hux when he drags his teeth over the right spots, or the wrong ones. Hux isn’t even sure what the distinction is, now: he’s tilting between the impulse to feel an appropriate measure of shame and a perhaps naively unexpected desire to indulge in delirious pleasure, and even the unsteady tilt itself feels good. He runs his hands over Kylo’s massive back, thinking: _This big oaf is mine now, all of this is mine_.

Only when Kylo moves away, to a chest beside the bed, does Hux feel overly exposed. He sits up and peers down at his leaking cock, wanting to cover himself. Kylo rummages through the chest until he finds what he was looking for: a jar of oil. Hux knows about this part. He was warned by the matchmaker that he should practice on himself prior to the marriage night. Hux could never bring himself to do it; it seemed filthy and unallowed, and the opportunity to swipe a jar of oil never arose.

Kylo crawls onto Hux again, hovering over him and clutching the oil in one hand. He’s studying Hux’s face, looking suddenly vexed. It occurs to Hux that Kylo might have been suffering with anxiety about this moment for months as well, though Hux never would have guessed it when they met this morning. Perhaps Kylo is afraid he’ll shoot as soon as he’s all in. Hux instructs himself not to laugh if that happens.

He tucks Kylo’s hair behind his ear, which is over-large like the rest of him, then touches Kylo’s lips, his big nose, a dark mole on his cheek. Kylo allows this, frowning slightly and waiting to see what Hux will do. He seems as if he’s waiting for permission to continue, and Hux isn’t sure how to give it without words. He sits up onto his elbows and rubs his face against Kylo’s, moves back to peek at his confused expression and does it again, brushing his lips against Kylo’s cheek this time.

“Don’t look at me like I’m too delicate for you,” Hux says when he drops back to the mattress. “You won’t break me. People from the east have our own sort of toughness. We’re not afraid of any--”

Kylo jams his lips against Hux’s and presses his tongue out to part them wetly. Hux opens for him, allowing Kylo’s clumsy tongue into his mouth and trying not to laugh at how simultaneously good and stupid it feels to press his own tongue against Kylo’s, until they’re sliding together and Kylo is moaning low, at the back of his throat. Hux hears the cap on the bottle of oil pop off.

“Yes,” Hux says, nodding. He feels as if they’re standing at the edge of a lagoon and he’s daring Kylo to jump in. “Do it.”

Kylo slicks his fingers. He looks very serious. Hux has to chew his bottom lip to hold in the building pressure of nervous laughter. The matchmaker had also suggested putting a pillow under his hips. That seems too dumb now, like a superstitious ritual.

Hux screams when the first finger goes in without finesse, and he punches at Kylo’s shoulders, cursing him. Kylo pulls his finger out just a fast as he stuck it in, which also hurts.

“Didn’t anyone teach you how to do this?” Hux asks, scowling. His face is on fire and his hole feels raw, but he finds he wants Kylo’s finger back, just _differently_. He shoves at Kylo anyway, annoyed by the pity and regret on his face. Kylo falls back onto his ass and looks like he’ll cry, which is funny enough to make Hux need to chew his lip again.

“Come here,” Hux says, though he’s the one who moves toward Kylo, straddling him. “You big, stupid ass,” Hux mutters, and he kisses Kylo, using his tongue again, until they’ve both calmed. Hux reaches behind him and grabs Kylo’s hand, which shakes now. He brings it around to his ass, keeping a tight hold on Kylo’s wrist as he repositions him. Kylo’s fingers squirm cluelessly between the heat of Hux’s cheeks, and they both exhale, Hux arching his back to get the right angle. He grasps one of Kylo’s fingers and rubs his stinging hole against the tip, hissing. Kylo stiffens, his other arm wrapping around Hux’s waist. His eyes are big; there’s something pleading in them. Kylo’s cock is pressed against the right cheek of Hux’s ass, throbbing and thickening as Hux guides his hand, keeping his eyes locked on Kylo’s as he does.

They both release a shallow gasp when the tip of Kylo’s finger slips in. It still stings, but Hux doesn’t want the sting gone; he wants more of it, though also not too much. He wiggles himself downward a bit, moaning and clenching around the intrusion. Kylo’s chest heaves between Hux’s bent legs, and his eyes shine when he stares at up at Hux. He looks worshipful-- _grateful_ , even.

“Good,” Hux says, nodding when Kylo crooks his finger a bit, working it in deeper. “Like that, yes, uh-huh.”

Hux enjoys feeling like an expert, even in something that’s actually new to him. He uses soft moans to encourage Kylo when he does something right with his finger as he slowly works it all the way in. Hux is short of breath by the time he’s seated on it, squirming and kissing Kylo’s parted lips. Every time Hux clenches around his finger, Kylo sighs with approval and strokes his other hand up Hux’s spine, then down again.

“We’d better just do it,” Hux finally says, when he’s begun to bounce on Kylo’s finger a bit, enjoying the shallow in-and-out drag. “I’m so tired. You must be, too.” He kisses Kylo’s fluttering eyelids and takes a moment to appreciate how strange it is that he’s feeling suddenly fond of this ridiculous man he somewhat insincerely swore to be loyal to for the rest of his life. Hux already likes Kylo’s face better than he did at first glance, and Kylo’s largeness feels as if it’s part of Hux’s own arsenal now, rather than some foreign weight he must contend with. Hux’s father had said this would happen; his first marriage had of course been arranged. Hux had thought Brendol the Fierce was only trying to soften the blow after selling Hux off to savages.

“Sit back,” Hux says, pressing at Kylo’s shoulders until they’re resting against the headboard. Hux reaches down, takes Kylo’s wrist and pulls his finger free, slowly. They both groan when it pops out, and Hux grabs for the oil. As soon as Hux wraps his oil-slicked hand around Kylo’s cock, he knows he won’t be able to seat himself upon it the way he did on Kylo’s finger. He’ll lose his nerve when he feels how thick it is, bumping against him. He’ll need Kylo to be the one who makes that first thrust. Kylo has more incentive to want that; he possesses the required momentum. For him it will only feel good, right away.

They stare at each other for a while. Kylo holds Hux’s arms and looks frightened. Hux tries to think of the best way to do this. He’s not afraid of the pain. Or, actually: he is, but only when he reaches back to grasp Kylo’s dick again, because Kylo feels even bigger than he looks. Kylo is breathing through his nose, licking his lips, squeezing Hux’s arms.

“What are you waiting for?” Hux asks, beginning to feel embarrassed by his own hesitation. “Throw me down and have your way with me.”

Kylo kisses Hux on the lips. He looks like he might cry when he pulls back, as if his confusion or nervous indecision is building toward panic.

“Surely you know what happens next?” Hux says, petting Kylo’s face. “So, here we go. Let’s get on with it. Then we can sleep.”

Hux clambers onto his hands and knees. He sinks down onto his elbows and points his readied ass at Kylo, holding his cheeks apart with one hand and spreading himself as widely as he can with his thumb and forefinger. So there can be no mistaking his intentions. He peeks back over his shoulder, aching for Kylo to cover him up, fill him, claim him. It will hurt, maybe it will even be awful, but it seems like something that needs to happen, and Hux is finally eager to find out just how it will go.

“Come on,” Hux says, dipping one finger down to rub his hole invitingly when Kylo just sits there looking hypnotized. He’s staring at the right spot, anyway, his mouth hanging open. “Get in there,” Hux says. “I might scream, but I won’t break.”

Kylo moves toward him. Hux lets go of his ass, confident that the message has been received. He buries his face against the mattress, humiliated by this posture but determined to get this part over with before they sleep. He’s heard that it gets better after the initial shock, and he’s enjoyed the build-up far more than he expected to.

Hux tries to remain as relaxed as possible when he feels Kylo’s palms on his ass cheeks, pulling them apart. Then, for some reason, Kylo’s breath on his hole-- he needs to inspect it that closely? --and then--

“What!” Hux says, his thighs trying to twitch together when the shock of Kylo’s hot tongue circling his hole blasts up his spine and makes his face flame. Kylo grunts, holds Hux’s thighs apart and licks him again. Hux opens his mouth to protest, the words he might have used dying in a long moan, because fuck, _fuck_ , that feels-- it’s so-- “You can’t,” Hux says, whining against the mattress, his back arching as his cock fills to an almost painful hardness. He presses back against Kylo’s tongue as if his body has secretly known he’s a barbarian all along, as if he’s been waiting for this all his life. “Kylo,” he manages, choking this out around the impulse to moan again. “Ren, you can’t-- You, it’s-- filthy, you’re--”

Hux drools against the mattress, his knees inching apart more widely as Kylo pushes his tongue into him, shamelessly kissing and sucking as if this is something that is _done_. The noises Hux makes are exhalations of quiet disbelief, soft and tinged with the trembling urge to protest. He could move away and slap at Kylo the way he did when Kylo jammed a finger into him, but this doesn’t feel like that did. This feels like something that Kylo should maybe never, ever stop doing. Hux can’t make any kind of rational sense of just what Kylo _is_ doing, exactly: sticking his tongue inside, then licking around in circles and down below, toward Hux’s cock, before dragging his tongue back up to the places where Hux is growing almost worryingly sensitive. New, more humiliating noises spill from Hux’s lips when this goes on and on, taking every tension from his body, as if Kylo is drinking the last of his hesitation from him, swallowing it up.

When Hux can’t wait any longer, he grabs his leaking cock and pumps himself once, twice, whining when Kylo growls in protest and pulls his hand away, replacing it with his own. Hux puts his cheek against the mattress and whimpers, rolling his hips back against Kylo’s wet, dirty mouth and then forward, trying to fuck Kylo’s hand. Kylo’s grip isn’t quite tight enough, and while his sloppy suckling at Hux’s ass is some kind of dark and powerful magic that is making Hux shake all over and moan out the most undignified noises that anyone from the East has ever uttered, he needs something more, too.

As if he’s read Hux’s mind, Kylo brings his fingertips to the rim of Hux’s hole and rubs them in teasing circles, still licking him and stroking his cock too gently. Something breaks in Hux’s chest, and it sounds too much like a sob. He feels like he’s going to come, and he reaches down to clamp his hand around Kylo’s, forcing Kylo’s fingers to tighten around his cock.

“Please,” Hux says, lifting his face from the mattress and arching like a whore in Kylo’s hands, well past caring about the propriety of any of this. He’s ready to behave like the barbarian that he today became, as long as he gets to come. “Please,” he says again, looking back over his shoulder to show Kylo his flushed face, begging with his whole body for something he can’t even name.

Kylo’s eyes have gotten very dark, but there’s a warmth in them, too, almost a kind of pity. He sits back, still holding Hux’s cock with one hand as he draws the thumb of his other hand up over Hux’s balls, dragging it firmly upward and pressing it into his wet, wanting hole with such a perfect pressure that Hux shouts, bucking back to get more of Kylo into him and gurgling with mindless pressure when Kylo either finds or _puts_ some magic thing inside him and rubs it until Hux is shouting again and coming in Kylo’s hand, nearly weeping as he empties himself, so gone that he doesn’t even care when he hears cheers and laughter outside the marriage hut. Of course those barbarians are out there in the square, beyond the short trees that line the yard, drinking heavily and waiting to hear signs of a successful physical union. Hux slumps down to the mattress, flopping into his own come as Kylo releases his spent cock and pulls his thumb out, carefully now.

Hux isn’t sure what to expect next; he certainly didn’t expect to feel so happily surrendered to whatever comes. He’s still trying to breathe normally, clenching around what now feels like an emptiness in his ass, when Kylo crawls up to roll him onto his side. Kylo runs his fingers through Hux’s hair and licks his cheek, his neck, then moves to his mouth.

“You can’t,” Hux mumbles, though he’s already parting his lips for Kylo’s tongue, lapping at him as if he’s hungry for it, too. He is, somehow. “Dirty-- You’re so-- just-- Filthy,” Hux says, flicking his eyes up to Kylo’s, though actually the taste isn’t as bad as he might have expected. Hux did clean himself thoroughly this morning, but then there was the long ride to the village, the sweat under his clothes. Perhaps his sweat isn’t so bad-tasting. Kylo’s smells good now, like wet cedar and wanton sex.

Kylo says something in the Western language. Though Hux isn’t sure what the word means, it makes him flush, because the way Kylo pronounces it as his fingers soothe through Hux’s hair makes it sound like an endearment. Kylo looks grateful again, maybe because Hux gave him what he wanted: pleasured screams loud enough to reach the ears of those who are celebrating outside. Hux flushes more deeply and moans, rolling onto his back. Kylo’s cock is very hard against his hip, still too big but undeniably ready for him, trails of precome dragging across Hux’s skin when Kylo twitches his hips needfully.

“Fine,” Hux says, sniffling and pulling his knees up to his chest. “Make me scream again, go on.”

Kylo moans with what sounds like sympathy and slicks his cock with more oil, rubbing the excess clumsily over Hux’s reddened hole. Hux whines and flexes for him, shameless, in this village where shame seems to not exist. He understands now that this is not merely a wedding night hut but their new home, where they will live together. There will be no grand palace ahead on the road. Hux is almost glad. He doesn’t want to leave this place where he found the courage to take his first steps into their barbarian life.

Hux exhales with as much restraint as he can when Kylo leans over him, his dark hair framing his face as he stares down at Hux and lines himself up. Even after all of Kylo’s strangely tender attention down there, the width of him feels insane when he tries to push in, and Hux keeps his expression as placid as possible when panic builds between his lungs and travels up his throat, escaping in a half-suppressed whimper that turns into a full-on cry when the head of Kylo’s cock seems to tear into him, slow but still overwhelming, already holding him open so widely. Kylo goes still and touches Hux’s cheek, searching his eyes when they crack open again.

“It’s okay,” Hux says, nodding. He adjusts himself, groaning when this shifts Kylo slightly deeper into him. “Fuh-fuck, just go, go, just--”

He tugs at Kylo’s shoulders, bringing their chests closer together and edging Kylo’s cock into him a bit more. Hux whines and Kylo moans, sounding sympathetic again. When Hux turns his cheek against the sheets he somehow ends up with Kylo’s thumb in his mouth, and he sucks at it hungrily even before he considers that this isn’t the thumb that was up his ass. He supposes it shouldn’t matter, since he lapped at Kylo’s mouth after it was all over down there.

Hux keeps Kylo’s thumb in his mouth as Kylo slips deeper into him. He bites gently in warning when he needs Kylo to slow down or stop altogether. They’re both coated in sweat, and the villagers outside are quiet now. Perhaps they’ve gone home, confident that the sealing has already been accomplished, when really they were only listening to Hux gyrating back against Kylo’s mouth. When Kylo is almost all in, when their shaking stomachs are pressed together, he leans down for a kiss, nipping at Hux’s bottom lip and then replacing his thumb with his tongue, breathing just as hard as Hux when he pulls back.

“You--” Hux says, panting when Kylo wipes some sweat from his temples. “You are so fucking-- In me, that’s just-- That’s so deep. Kylo-- Ren-- Fuck, what do I even call you?”

Kylo answers this-- or doesn’t --by sliding the last half inch of himself into Hux, his balls coming to rest against Hux’s wide open hole. Hux throws his head back, his mouth opening around a silent shout that becomes audible as a watery half-complaint when Kylo kisses his neck and whispers something that’s probably meant to be comforting against his skin. It is comforting, somehow, when Kylo slides one of his enormous arms under Hux’s neck, his other hand pushing into Hux’s sweat-damp hair. They peck at each other’s lips, every choppy exhale that they breathe out seeming to make the room and their bodies that much hotter, as if the whole world is flushing around them.

For all the buildup, Kylo only manages a few shallow thrusts before he starts making growling noises that seem like warnings that he’s about to fill Hux until he overflows. Hux lets his arms and shoulders go limp as he takes it, his legs tight around Kylo’s sides. They both cry out brokenly when Kylo comes, seeming to shove in just a bit deeper, his cock thickening with every pulse of his release. Then he’s emptied entirely into Hux, slowly sliding out while Hux pants up blindly at the ceiling, his head lolling on the mattress. He was not taught that surrender could feel good, and this is such an undeniable relief that he feels like he’s woken up in a new, invincible body.

As soon as they’re disconnected, Kylo kisses Hux as if he’s just been pulled from the sea and needs the breath pushed back into his lungs. Hux takes a possessive handful of Kylo’s hair and peers up at him with building, giddy wonder when he breaks their kiss, Kylo’s nose still pressed to his.

“Thank you,” Hux says, not sure what he’s expressing gratitude for. His ass aches, but Kylo was careful with him after that initial clueless jab of his finger. Hux is so tired that he’s sincerely excited about the opportunity to roll over and sleep, imagining he will rest more comfortably than he has in years. There’s truly nothing he’d rather do right now, and no place he would rather be. He can’t remember the last time he shared a bed with anyone.

“Thank you,” Kylo repeats, in his awkward accent. He kisses Hux’s nose and leaves the bed, returning with a jug of water. Hux gulps from it and nods appreciatively, suppressing the urge to mutter _thank you_ a hundred more times, until he drops straight into sleep.

Kylo walks around the small house, putting all the candles out. Hux wonders if his powers allow him to see in the dark, though soon enough Hux’s eyes have adjusted in the moonlight from the window. There’s a thrill that runs through him when Kylo climbs into the bed, something akin to fear but closer to anticipation. Kylo moves against him under the blankets, enormous in the darkness, spilling all around Hux when they come together at the middle of the bed, legs tangling and arms circling. Hux feels as if they’ve forged some kind of new and amazing understanding of what two people are capable of doing together, though he knows it’s just the same old thing that many have done already, and without much skill. Still, it’s their version of it, their own first try, irreplaceable and unrepeatable. He clings to Kylo as the sweat on his skin finally cools and a chill settles over the room, Kylo’s heartbeat thumping a calming rhythm against against Hux’s cheek.

“Are you mine?” Hux asks when he’s delirious, some celebratory part of him fighting sleep.

Kylo grunts softly into Hux’s hair. He says something that Hux interprets as _Go to sleep_ , and Hux tucks his face under Kylo’s chin, his body sore and singing, slotted perfectly against Kylo’s in the dark. He’s not sure how he thought his wedding night would end, but stunned, sleepy contentment was not something he’d dared to hope for. 

**

Hux wakes up twice during the night, confused both times about where he is. He remembers Kylo before he remembers their location: the smell of him and the way he breathes, the weight of his arm over Hux’s side. Again, he thinks of what his father said, which had seemed glib and empty at the time. _You’ll get physically attached before you know it, and that goes a long way toward the rest_. Hux reminds himself that the physical can be deceptive, especially when it comes to arousal and comfort, but at the moment he’s too tired to fight the impulse to believe that his current sense of contentment is evidence of something real and already unbreakable.

Kylo fetches the water jug the second time Hux wakes. He yawns while Hux drinks from it, his hand soft on Hux’s back. Kylo seems physically attached already, too, and he crowds Hux as soon as he slides back under the blankets. He tugs Hux against his chest as snugly as he did when they were on horseback, as if there’s a danger of him dropping away. Hux doesn’t mind this time. He settles back into the heat of Kylo’s body and peers drowsily at the dim moonlight through the window until he’s asleep again.

At dawn, there are voices outside. Hux half-wakes, tensing up when he feels Kylo sliding away from him and leaving the bed. Hux sits up and pulls the blankets over his naked shoulders while he watches Kylo dress, returning his sword to the holster that crosses his back.

“Where are you going?” Hux asks in a whisper, his heart pounding when the voices remain just outside the front door, five or six men laughing and talking in the western tongue.

Kylo says something in his language to Hux, who stares at him blankly. Kylo’s efforts to make what appear to be an eating motion with his hands and mouth only result in further confusion.

“Shall I dress and go with you?” Hux asks. Kylo must be referring to breakfast, though it seems odd that he would go in search of it outside the house, and so early.

Kylo responds by walking to the bed, kissing Hux’s cheek, and leaving the house. Outside, a cheer goes up as he joins the group of men who have gathered to wait for him. Hux is anxious, curling in on himself under the blankets and wishing he was dressed. It’s a relief when the men leave, Kylo going with them by the sounds of it, but the quiet that follows is unsettling, too.

For a long time, Hux sits waiting. He’s not sure what for, and when things remain quiet outside he musters the courage to dart around the room collecting his clothes. His wedding garments seem too ridiculous to wear to bed, so he piles them on a trunk near the window and pulls on only his tunic, then wraps himself in the bedclothes again. His heart is pounding, and he recognizes a growing sense of betrayal that he dislikes tremendously, both because he doesn’t want to already be capable of feeling betrayed by Kylo and because he suspects he’s being overly sensitive. His ass still stings a bit, but not as badly as he expected. When the sun comes up outside he begins to feel foolish for huddling in bed like a frightened child and gets up, wandering the house and taking stock of all the new things that are half his now.

He’s cataloging the contents of the pantry, finding nothing he’d like to eat, when he hears footsteps coming up the stone path that leads to the front door. It doesn’t sound like Kylo’s heavy footfall, and the sharp rap on the door confirms that this visitor is not Hux’s husband returning from whatever errand he set off on at dawn. Hux stands in the doorway of the pantry, wearing only his socks, his tunic and a woven blanket from the bed over his shoulders. He’s not fit to receive company according to his own customs, and not sure what the protocol is for allowing people to enter the home while Prince Kylo is away. The person at the door knocks again, and when Hux remains frozen in the kitchen the knocker opens the door and strolls into the house as if it’s their right to do so.

Hux quickly sees why: it’s Queen Organa, dressed in a long, belted dress and again wearing her hair in a crown-like braid. Hux has no idea what to say or do and remains standing in the shadowy kitchen as she approaches, his heart slamming in his chest.

“There you are,” she says, in Hux’s language. She smiles. “I thought you might appreciate a chat.”

“A chat?” Hux is flushed again, embarrassed by it now. “With me?”

“Yes, with you. I know we left you twisting in the wind last night, with my son not speaking your language and nobody taking time to explain anything to you, but that’s tradition. It’s a test of your toughness, in a sense. Are you all right?”

This question makes Hux clench around the burning ache that Kylo left in his ass, and his flush reaches near catastrophic levels.

“I’m fine,” he says. “But where has my-- Your-- Where has Kylo gone?”

“Off for the traditional hunt. It’s done on the morning after a Prince’s wedding. All the noble sons of his age go off together and bring back fresh meat for a celebratory feast.”

“Ah.” Hux supposes he has no cause to feel left out, as he is not part of this tradition and was never taught how to do anything so pedestrian as hunting for meat. That’s what servants are for, at home. But when he imagines Kylo riding about with some local men and clapping them on the back after a successful kill, he’s jealous. The Queen smiles as if she’s sensed this.

“Let’s sit down and have some tea,” she says. “I’ll prepare it.”

“Shouldn’t I?” Hux asks, fidgeting. “This is my home, isn’t it?”

“Yes, you’ll reside here with Ben until he becomes King.”

“Ben?”

“His childhood name-- When a boy comes of age here, he chooses his own warrior name. I call him Ben out of habit. Sit down, I’ll start the tea.”

“Can’t I help?” Hux asks, though fixing tea is a job for some of the lowliest servants back home. He wants to do something, anyway, beyond absorbing whatever’s next with numb acceptance.

“Just sit,” Organa says, waving him toward the table. “I know where everything is. This was my marriage house once, too, you know.”

Hux takes a seat, wishing he had dressed in something more fitting an audience with a queen, even if she is only a barbarian queen. He watches her get the cups, fill the kettle with water and light the fire at the stove. She does this last task in the same way that Kylo lit the candles, with a mere wave of her hand that sets the logs ablaze. Conversation topics scroll through Hux’s mind, but all of them seem too ridiculous or inappropriate to try. Though she rules over a barbarian culture, there is something refined about the Queen that reminds Hux of his father and the way he carries himself as if he knows everything and therefore has the right to feel comfortable in any social circumstance.

“I hope things went well last night?” Organa says when they’re both seated at the table with steaming cups of tea.

Hux nods and hurries to sip from his cup, though the tea is too hot and burns his tongue a bit.

“I’m the only one in the village who speaks your language,” Organa says. “I’m trying to teach one of my assistants some basic terminology, so that he can serve you and the Prince here in your household, but that’s a work in progress. In the meantime, I want you to be comfortable here, and if you have any concerns, I hope you’ll speak to me about them.”

“I will,” Hux says, not actually planning to. His father instructed him to be gracious but also to trust no one, particularly the royal family.

“My son can seem rather gruff at times,” Organa says. “But he’s a kind-hearted man who takes good care of those who are loyal to him.”

This feels like both a reassurance and a subtle warning. _Remain loyal and you will be rewarded._

Hux nods. “Kylo has been kind to me,” he says, his face still on fire. “I-- Slept comfortably.”

“Good.” Organa smiles and sips from her tea. “He’s been lonely for most of his life. Not for lack of company, but because of his station and his powers. Both things set him apart. I suppose you’ve heard some things about what he’s capable of?”

“I wasn’t sure if they were just rumors, but-- Yes. And I saw-- He can manipulate fire like you can.”

“It’s not fire specifically that we can control. He’s much more talented than I am. I made sure he was properly trained in this area. No one taught me how to use my own powers, but that’s a long story and perhaps best saved for another time. I only want to make sure that you’re not afraid of him after seeing evidence of what he can do. He has used his powers in battle, for the good of our people, but his training forbids him from using them against his own people, and you’re one of us now.”

“I’m not concerned about that,” Hux says, though now he is, a bit. He’s not sure what her game is, coming here like this to speak to him about Kylo as if in warning. Perhaps she’s being straightforward, but she’s very hard to read. Last night, Hux had felt as if he had only needed to look into Kylo’s eyes to gain access to his every emotion. Organa’s eyes are warm like Kylo’s, but guarded.

“Good,” Organa says, after a long pause that was perhaps awkward. She stands. “I’ll leave you now. Kylo and the others will be back from the hunt soon. It’s tradition that the newly married couple celebrates a successful hunt together. I hope you’re not too tired?”

“I’m not,” Hux says, tempted to take offense.

Queen Organa makes her departure, moving out into the village with only one guard trailing behind her as she returns to the sprawling lodge where she resides with the royal father. Hux watches her go and then turns back to the kitchen, left with the tea dishes. He clears them into the sink and then feels angry; where are their servants? Though these people are barbarians, surely the Prince and his husband will be permitted a kitchen maid. The Queen mentioned training some assistant of hers to communicate with Hux, but that may only be for purposes of ceremony and interaction with the Queen and royal father.

Hux’s mood has grown dark when he hears laughter and boasting voices out on the street, and he’s scowling when Kylo comes through the door with the dripping carcass of a deer. Kylo slings it onto the kitchen table as if it belongs there and turns to Hux. The joyous, almost boyish expression on Kylo’s face stops Hux from making any complaints that wouldn’t be understood anyway, and when Kylo pulls him close, Hux opens his mouth only to receive a long, wet kiss. There’s something demanding about the way Kylo holds Hux against him, as if he’s earned it, but there’s a tenderness, too. After the disorienting morning spent alone, Hux is glad for the chance to have Kylo in his arms again, even though Kylo is dirt streaked, the scent of his sweat now edging away from appealing and more toward unclean.

Kylo mutters some kind of endearment and drags his dirty hand through Hux’s hair. Hux grunts in acknowledgement and peeks at the deer on the table. The smell of blood is new to him. It’s not entirely off-putting, but it is dripping onto the floor at an alarming rate.

“I hope we have servants who will clean that up,” Hux says when Kylo kisses his face. “I’m certainly not going to.”

Kylo picks Hux up without attempting to answer, leaning back to check Hux’s expression when he grumbles out a surprised half-protest, his arms winding around Kylo’s neck even so. For a moment Hux is afraid he’ll be deposited onto the kitchen table alongside the deer carcass and fucked there according to some savage tradition, and he’s glad when Kylo carries him to their bedroom instead, then to the bath.

“You’re a mess,” Hux says. He takes the initiative to undress Kylo, starting with the belt that he’s now mastered. Kylo has blood streaked on his arms and across his chest, from carrying that dead beast into the house. “Do you know that your mother was here?”

Kylo responds by pulling off Hux’s tunic. He makes a low noise of approval when he sees that Hux is not wearing underthings and is already getting hard for him. When his hands travel over Hux’s bare chest and down to his cock, Hux leans into the touch, laughing under his breath. He’s laughing at himself, and at the situation, mostly out of a kind of dizzy relief that he feels he can’t yet trust. He kisses Kylo when he gives Hux a questioning look upon hearing this laughter.

The village’s plumbing is sophisticated enough that a pump fills the tub, and Hux tries not to fawn too noticeably when Kylo uses his powers to heat the water. A light steam rises over the surface after Kylo removes his hand, and he checks Hux’s expression as if to make sure that he appreciates what just happened. Hux nods and peels off his socks, eager to get clean after last nights festivities.

“Thank you,” Hux says, hoping that Kylo at least understands this phrase. “I do like a hot bath.”

Hux didn’t expect to enjoy cleaning Kylo just as much as having a soak and washing himself. Again, this is a job for servants at home, or at least for oneself if one is modest, but Kylo’s body is beautiful, and Hux can’t manage to muster up much shame for the pleasure he takes in scrubbing Kylo’s skin clean with his soapy hands. He starts with Kylo’s face, moving down to his neck and shoulders, his cock pulsing under the water as his hands move over Kylo’s chest. Kylo makes approving noises and pulls Hux’s legs open around him, his hands busy in Hux’s hair in a way that might be an effort to clean it.

“You have to use soap,” Hux says, reaching for some. “You must know that. Your hair is-- Your hair is not unsatisfactory.”

It’s actually lovely, silky with gentle waves, something Hux failed to notice during their wedding ceremony or even in bed last night. All he’d really taken time to note was that Kylo’s hair was black and overly long, but now the length seems just right, at least for the purpose of having Hux’s fingers running indulgently through it. There’s a kind of ladle available for hair-wetting, less sophisticated than the lacquered bucket Hux had in his bath at home but effective enough when Hux wets Kylo’s hair with three scoops from the tub. Kylo blinks as the water runs over his face, his massive shoulders lowered and his expression flashing between pleasure and something more like tired trust. Hux shifts into Kylo’s lap when he rubs his soapy fingers through Kylo’s hair, both of them breathing harder when their cocks slide together.

“I hope you enjoyed your hunt,” Hux says, mumbling this against Kylo’s lips after they’ve begun to rut lazily against each other, Kylo’s hands tight on his waist under the water.

Kylo blinks up at Hux and searches his eyes. He doesn’t seem frustrated by their inability to communicate-- In fact, it doesn’t feel like a barrier to communication so much as conversation. Hux feels well enough understood when Kylo wraps one big hand around both of their cocks and strokes firmly, kissing Hux’s face when he moans and nods.

Hux comes first, slumping into Kylo’s arms and panting against his shoulder. The water seems too hot in the aftermath, and he clings to Kylo gladly when he feels him shuddering through his own orgasm, his choppy exhale landing against Hux’s right ear. Though he slept well, Hux is unsteady with exhaustion when he stands, and he takes Kylo’s hand as they step out of the water. It’s a relief to find that Kylo’s next destination is the bed, and Hux falls onto it with him, lying horizontally across the mattress and rolling against Kylo’s warm, newly cleaned skin.

“Is this really my life now?” Hux asks, his eyes closed as Kylo’s fingers slide through his damp hair. “Am I now merely your bedmate, meant to wait for you here?” 

Hux is almost tempted to believe he could enjoy that. So far, it’s been a welcome relief from his life at court in the East, where he spent most of his time sitting stiffly at lessons or in some authority’s audience. This respite reminds him of long ago days of childhood, when he was allowed to nap in the afternoon or fall asleep against his mother’s shoulder on carriage rides. Maybe it will quickly grow boring, but at the moment it feels like something long needed and finally recieved. He smiles, his eyes still closed, when he feels Kylo lifting his hand to kiss his wedding ring.

Hux wakes up disoriented, smelling of bath soap and clean sweat. Kylo is asleep beside him, apparently unperturbed by the sound of people entering their house. He grunts and blinks irritably when Hux shakes him awake.

“What’s going on?” Hux asks, whispering. Multiple voices can be heard from the kitchen, speaking in the Western tongue. Kylo draws Hux close again and mutters a disinterested answer. Hux yanks the blankets up to their cheeks and huddles against Kylo’s chest, listening.

After a few moments, and with considerable relief, Hux determines that these people in the kitchen are the servants, finally allowed to enter now that the initial marital bonding has occurred. He listens intently to their preparations while Kylo sleeps, his arm heavy over Hux’s side and his breath hot in Hux’s hair. Hux hears the servants hauling the deer carcass off the table-- where it likely never belonged-- and then there are hacking sounds from the yard, water running, pots and pants clanging together, muttered arguments between participants in this work. Hux sleeps thinly when he’s accepted that none of these people will enter the bedroom and demand anything of him or Kylo, homesick for the careful silence of the servants who served his household back east.

Some hours later, they are awakened by a small man with dark hair who clears his throat and blushes tremendously, standing at the end of the bed. Kylo takes one look at this man, yawns, and drops his head to the pillow again.

“Excuse me,” the man says in Hux’s language, awkward and heavily accented. “My lord, the Queen sent me to prepare you for the feast.”

“That sounds ominous,” Hux says, sneering at the bad phrasing. “As if you’re going to skin me and cook me. My husband might object.”

Kylo sighs, half asleep, and tightens his grip on Hux as if in agreement. The man at the end of the bed looks distressed, and like he didn’t entirely understand that statement, except to perceive it as some sort of criticism. His eyes have a disarmingly innocent quality that makes Hux suspicious.

“Forgive me, sir,” he says. “My name is Mitaka. I’ve been assigned to your household. I am not from the East. This language is new to me.”

“I can tell,” Hux says, and then he feels a bit cruel, despite his suspicion, because of Mitaka’s deer-like eyes. “But you’re doing fine for a beginner. What needs doing, anyway? To ready me for this feast? I’ve already bathed.” 

“Just a few small preparations, my lord,” Mitaka says. “Dressing, mostly.” 

Hux reaches down to pass his hand over Kylo’s hair, though his mother would say that it’s very tacky to demonstrate casual intimacy in the presence of a flustered servant. Hux feels smug and pleased with himself anyway. _This is mine_ , he thinks, resting his hand on Kylo’s massive shoulder. As if everyone in this village doesn’t know it. It’s more likely that they think Hux now belongs to Kylo, or to the whole Western tribe in some respect. Hux wants it understood that he has conquered the sleeping beast in his bed, too.

Hux dresses in his tunic and allows Mitaka to introduce him to his new wardrobe, which is waiting for him in the cabinet across from the bed. Though it’s embarrassing to realize that he cares, Hux is pleased when Kylo drags himself out of bed to participate in the selection of Hux’s outfit for the feast. Kylo yawns tremendously and scratches at the flat of his stomach as he walks over to Hux and Mitaka, shamelessly naked and tossing his lovely hair back. Mitaka’s previously cooling blush intensifies, and Hux tries not to enjoy it too much. He’s a bit pink across his cheeks himself, his cock stirring at the sight of Kylo’s, which is heavy and thick even while soft. _That’s been inside me_ , Hux thinks, flushing as he nods thoughtlessly at something Mitaka stammers about underthings.

Kylo has opinions about Hux’s clothes, and he offers them to Mitaka in the same cocky tone he used during the wedding ceremony yesterday, short and to the point, not listening to Mitaka’s half-articulated responses. Hux has opinions, too, and he takes some things out of Kylo’s hands and shakes his head when they’re too ostentatious or the colors seem wrong. Kylo frowns at these corrections. Hux ignores Kylo’s protests except to press a gently admonishing hand to his arm in rebuttal. It works well enough; Hux has seen both of his parents use this technique on each other. He remembers his mother fretting that Western people might not be affectionate and grins at his reflection in the mirror inside the bureau as Mitaka presses a fine tunic over his bare chest. Hux should have known his mother’s worry was pointless: it seems obvious now that even the most brutal warrior would be vulnerable to anything soft in the privacy of his rooms. 

The process of getting Hux dressed is a delicate dance of semi-verbal communication, but Hux feels comfortable within it, bolstered by his success in the bed and the bath. By the time Kylo is dressing for the feast, Hux is fully outfitted in a tunic resembling the one he arrived in, pants that are tighter than the ones he’s accustomed to, plain but well-made boots and a light coat with bright red piping. He’s wearing a circlet over his hair and silver bracelets that are like finer compliments to Kylo’s leather armbands, which Mitaka helps him tie. Hux smiles at Kylo from across the room as he waits for him to finish with his own preparations. Kylo lifts his chin slightly and allows his lips to twitch into a tiny smirk before resuming a stony expression for Mitaka, who straightens and unrolls a selection of hair clips for Kylo.

Hux feels a bit ridiculous as he walks to the center of the village with Kylo’s hand in his, trying not to shrink against the volume of the villagers who cheer wildly as they approach. It seems as if the entire population has come out to see them, and though guards are present Hux would prefer it if the commoners hadn’t been allowed to come so close. Hux smiles as he’s not startled by the display, keeping a tight hold on Kylo’s hand. Kylo roars some boasting statement to the crowd, and an even louder cheer goes up. Hux stiffens instinctively, more accustomed to polite applause from a distance. He feels somewhat better when Kylo tucks an arm around his waist and draws him closer.

“You look lovely,” Organa says when they’ve made their way to her table at the center of the square, decorated lavishly and sporting several bottles of what appears to be liquor. Hux nods in thanks and eyes the bottles, in need of a drink. Organa says something to Kylo in their language and he grunts. He doesn’t seem to respect her, or perhaps they’re so close that formalities are not observed even in the presence of their people.

“Greetings,” the royal father says when Hux’s gaze shifts to his, and Hux can see some of Kylo’s prideful distaste for ceremony in his father’s humorless expression.

Hux is introduced to others, and their names wash over him with increasing irrelevance as servants refill his wine cup. Kylo partakes liberally as well, and tugs Hux closer and closer on the wide chair they’re both seated on as the meal continues into dusk and then past nightfall. There is music, some people give speeches, and Kylo accepts many gifts, passing them into Hux’s hands and peering at him with a kind of entreating gaze that makes Hux want to swoon in and kiss him, because it feels as if Kylo is asking for Hux’s permission to enjoy each new treasure that’s passed into their hands, hoping he’ll approve. Hux nods indulgently every time, even when they’re given a giant, stinking wheel of cheese by some peasant.

The dancing that Hux has dreaded commences after the dishes are cleared away, and Hux is anxious despite all the wine he’s consumed, but his trepidation doesn’t last long. Kylo is a terrible dancer, as far as Hux can tell, out of step with the others, but everyone in attendance is fairly drunk and the music is loud enough to conceal the absurdity of Hux’s own terrible dancing. Somehow this parade of embarrassments becomes fun, and Hux is laughing along with the others as he falls against Kylo and allows himself to be swayed back and forth, wildly or languidly, according to the music. Twice Hux feels Kylo’s erection nudging his thigh from beneath his heavy breeches, and he presses his red face to Kylo’s shoulder, similarly affected within his tightening pants.

Their departure from the feast is a stumbling blur, and Hux’s reservations about a repeat performance of last night’s festivities are gone as soon as his back hits the bed. He’s reckless, mumbling endearments against Kylo’s lips and tugging his fine new clothes off, scattering them across the bed. He’s still got his bracelets on when Kylo pushes into him again, oil slathered between them and Kylo’s mouth on his neck. Hux can feel the rawness of his first time as Kylo slides in and out of him, but even the lingering sting feels good. It all feels so unexpectedly, almost inexplicably good. Hux throws his head back, moans, digs his heels into Kylo’s back and rolls his own nipples between his fingers while Kylo fucks him very slowly.

“I love this,” Hux says, aware that he’s babbling but so far past caring that he feels free to do anything from now on, even this. “And you,” he says, grabbing Kylo’s face with both hands. “And you,” he says again, more softly, his lips bumping against Kylo’s and then opening for his tongue.

He’s not even sure if it’s true: how could it be? But when he falls asleep in Kylo’s arms it feels just as impossible that this drunken declaration could be anything less than entirely accurate. Hux is sore and spent and sated, in love with this feeling and therefore, at least for now, with the man who is wrapped around him in their marriage bed.

**

Hux wakes up with a headache and a sense of foreboding so intense and immediate that it feels like an additional physical pain. When he lifts his head from the pillow and sees a scarred ghoul standing at the window over the bed and hatefully peering in at him, he knows why. He’s in danger: that thing outside, its face twisted in a hissing grimace, wants to kill him. 

He jerks, tries to scream, and awakens from the nightmare. 

The first thing he notices is that he’s alone in the bed. He whirls toward the window, bracing himself to be attacked, but there is no ghoul snarling in at him. It’s still very dark out, the moon behind some clouds, and Hux’s heart is still slamming as if it knows, despite evidence to the contrary, that he’s in grave danger that swiftly approaches. 

“Kylo?” he calls, staring at the dark doorway that leads out to the rest of the house. The night is silent, and so calm that it feels like a threat, like an unseen beast that stalks him, waiting to pounce. “Ren?” he tries, his voice steadying a bit. 

No answer comes, and Hux shudders beneath the blankets when he realizes he’s alone in the house. He’s not a deep sleeper, and when Ren left the bed he should have awakened. Maybe it was the alcohol that prevented this. He checks the window again, shivering even when he sees no one standing there. The ghoul in his dream had been horrible not just in appearance but in a kind of unmatched malicious energy, as if it represented evil itself, a force so pure in its hatred that it was inhuman. The form it took could have been human, like that of a very old man who had suffered disfiguring injuries to his face long ago, but it resembled a reanimated skeleton just as much as it did a man. 

“Kylo?” Hux says again, softly. He knows Kylo won’t hear him, but he wants to call for him again, the face at the window in his dream still vivid enough in his memory to seem like that of a real enemy. 

The sun has started to come up by the time Hux hears Kylo’s footsteps on the front path, and Hux hasn’t been able to get back to sleep. He sits up, unwilling to be kind about Kylo’s unexplained absence and return this time, no matter how happy he appears when he comes through the doorway. 

But this is nothing like Kylo’s return from the hunt: he’s alone, the whole village still silent outside. He halts in the bedroom doorway as if he’s surprised to find Hux awake. He looks frightened, pale and exhausted. 

“Where have you been?” Hux asks, though he knows he won’t get an answer.

Kylo shakes his head. He takes off his sword and holster, shoves his pants down and kicks his boots off along with them. When he moves toward the bed, Hux glowers at him. Kylo ducks his eyes away and slumps onto the pillows, scooting closer and reaching for Hux. 

“Where were you?” Hux asks when Kylo’s arm slides around him. His skin is cool, which is alarming, considering that even the eastern chill hadn’t seemed to reach him on their wedding day. He’s shivering.

“Master,” Kylo says, muttering. 

Hux snorts; at home, that word means something that Kylo isn’t likely to apply to Hux. 

“Are you all right?” Hux asks. 

Kylo pinches his eyes shut and swallows heavily. He clutches at Hux more desperately when Hux strokes his hair. 

Hux turns to the window, the hair at the back of his neck rising when he fears again that he’ll find that ghoul from his dream watching them. He tugs the blankets up over Kylo, not quite relieved to see nothing. Something is wrong; Kylo is obviously stricken, and Hux can’t shake the feeling that something powerful took him from their bed last night. 

“Well,” Hux says, turning away from the window and settling against Kylo, their foreheads pressed together. “There’s only one thing for it. You’re going to have to learn to speak my language so you can explain yourself to me. I’ll learn yours, too, naturally, but I’d like it if we had one we could speak in the presence of the villagers without being understood, also. That would come in handy, don’t you think?”

Hux is babbling nervously, but he means what he’s saying. His head still hurts from all the drinking they did at the feast. He runs his fingertips over Kylo’s clammy cheek. 

“Are you mine?” Kylo asks in a whisper, lifting his gaze to meet Hux’s.

For a moment Hux is startled, as if this is a signal that Kylo knows at least some of his language already, but he’s only repeating what Hux asked on their wedding night, thinking it means something it doesn’t. The look in Kylo’s eyes indicates that he thinks he’s asking _Will everything be okay?_ or _Can you help me?_

“Yes,” Hux says, in answer to all of those questions. He nods and kisses Kylo’s face, heartened when he feels Kylo’s skin beginning to warm under his hands. “Yes, of course.” 

Kylo huddles against Hux’s chest, pressing his face to Hux’s throat. He sighs and holds on tight, his shivering ceasing as he sinks into sleep. Outside, the sun continues to rise. Hux strokes his husband’s hair and feels something rising through him, too. He’s waited so long for a war of his own, a chance to prove that he’s more than a strong leader’s well-guarded son. He wouldn’t have guessed that this battle might involve saving the massive barbarian he married from some mysterious menace that steals him from their bed in the dark of night, but he feels determined, as the room fills with light, to do whatever he must to keep his beloved oaf safe from any evil his own magic can’t defeat. 

 

**


	2. Chapter 2

Though the nightly elation of the marriage bed persists, it does not take Hux long to begin looking at everyone and everything in the Western village with a careful, calculating eye. He did not expect to be scrutinizing his surroundings on his husband’s behalf as well as his own, but he’s increasingly concerned about Kylo’s well-being, and still unwilling to trust anyone else with questions about the late night trips into the forest that, two months into their marriage, Kylo has undertaken on four separate occasions. The Queen is often preoccupied with village business, and Hux was instructed by his father not to take her into his confidence under any circumstances. Mitaka is helpful in practical matters, but asking him about Kylo’s nighttime sneaking about seems too akin to a betrayal. Hux doesn’t speak to anyone else, though he has been invited along on a few unfortunate outings with Kylo’s hunting friends. They are useless as advisors of any sort, a pack of foul-smelling brutes who laughed when Hux was not immediately adept with the bow and arrow that Kylo gave him as a gift. 

Hux is strategic when questioning Kylo about anything more delicate than what he would like to do in bed or what sort of meat the servants have brought them for dinner. He’s waiting for a sturdier vocabulary to build up between them before asking about matters that are perhaps more delicate, not wanting to be misunderstood in a way that will make Kylo draw back from the bond that has continued to steadily grow between them. He’s considered following Kylo into the woods to see for himself what Kylo gets up to there, but so far Kylo has slipped away undetected every time, while Hux sleeps deeply. Hux has not dreamed about the ghoul at the window again, but he’s easily startled when he’s alone in the house and sometimes even when he is out with Kylo in the village, close to the edge of the woods. He feels sometimes as if a shadow of the thing he saw is watching him, waiting. 

When Hux wakes on a fifth night to find Kylo gone, he sits up in bed and watches the window, his heart hammering just as hard as it did the first time and just as it has every time afterward. He’s attempted some rudimentary questioning on past nights like this, and he steels himself to do more than that this time, trying to remain angry. Mostly, however, he is terrified: not for himself but for Kylo, who always returns from these departures weak and wan, so humbled in Hux’s arms that Hux can’t bear to thoroughly interrogate him. Hux is determined to do so tonight, however, and he watches the progress of the moon across the sky, yanking the blankets up to his chin every time the wind moves even softly through the fruit trees that line their yard. 

The hours alone pass slowly. Hux considers the progress of the previous evening, puzzling over what he might now consider clues that this would happen again. They’d had dinner in the village’s communal hall, as the royal family was hosting some traveling dancers from the south and everyone was expected to coo over their performance while consuming the meal. Hux had clapped as politely as possible. Kylo drank two tankards of ale and squeezed Hux’s leg under the table, infusing him with irregular curls of arousal that helped him stay awake as the performance seemed to go on and on. When they were finally allowed to leave, they hurried along the path to the house and retired to their bedroom, where they engaged in one of their favorite type of language lessons, re-confirming that Kylo now knows the Eastern words for ‘chest,’ ‘hands,’ ‘ass’ and so forth. Hux is able to pick up more of the Western vocabulary already, but they always speak to each other in Hux’s language, so that presumably only Mitaka and the Queen will understand them if they are overheard in public. 

So there had been sex, not much conversation but a few tender words exchanged in the aftermath, and Kylo was smiling when Hux fell asleep, stroking his fingers through Hux’s hair as if he was the most perfectly contented man in the village. And why shouldn’t he be?

But now he’s gone off to traipse in the woods in the dead of night, and Hux is left to wonder if this will be the time when Kylo doesn’t return. 

He knows that Kylo travels into the woods during these nighttime disappearances, because of the twigs in his hair and the smell on his skin when he returns, and also because, when Hux asked if Kylo was in the forest, so far his boldest inquiry about these departures, Kylo had tiredly nodded. Hux can only presume the question was properly understood, but there’s really no other place for Kylo to go on foot. The village is surrounded by dense forest on all sides; it provides a kind of protection that has flummoxed Hux’s people in the past, in terms of devising a way to slip through it without being detected, instead resulting in their soldiers always being caught and defeated in terrain that the Western people are far more familiar with. No attack since the destruction of Alderaan has been stealthy enough, in Hux’s lifetime. Hux now has to assume that the cultivation of Kylo’s powers can be credited with this Western foresight, and those of the Queen before him. He turns again to the dark window and tugs the blankets up over his chest, trying to imagine how he might relay this information to his father, who will expect critical intelligence when they meet again. 

What would Brendol the Fierce do with this knowledge? Hux thinks he knows, and doesn’t want to linger on the probability of it. Poison, a silent dagger slipped between Kylo’s ribs in bed, a pillow over his face after a night of drinking and sex like the one they just spent together-- But, no. Brendol had never mentioned anything like that outright. It’s possible that he won’t ask it of Hux. Possible, even, that Hux would refuse if he did, though just the thought of refusing his father’s orders sends a cold rush of dread shivering down the length of his limbs. 

The first gentle hints of morning spread over the horizon outside, and the chill that has crept into Hux’s bones lingers, then intensifies. He moves closer to the window and watches the road and the trees in the yard, goosebumps soaring down over the back of his neck as the sky grows brighter, the light of the coming day flaying him with quiet menace when Kylo does not return. Hux exhales in a rush of angry relief when he finally sees Kylo’s massive form slipping among the shadows that linger outside. He’s moving slowly: limping. 

“Where?” Hux asks as soon as Kylo has dragged himself through their bedroom door. They covered the question words early, with Mitaka’s help as translator. Kylo braces his hands on the doorframe and looks struck by the commanding edge in Hux’s voice. It is a tone Hux has reserved for emergency purposes, not used on Kylo since he shoved a clumsy finger into Hux that first night. 

“Forest,” Kylo says, stumbling over the word a bit. There’s an edge in his voice, too, as if Hux should know this. It is ground that they have already covered, but only just. 

“You’re hurt?” Hux says. 

Kylo stares at him. He’s so tired; Hux can feel it in a kind of sympathetic wave that travels from Kylo’s body and begs for something from Hux’s in answer. Perhaps it’s only that Hux is very tired, too, after half a night spent in mild to medium panic. 

“Your foot,” Hux says. Kylo knows all the words for parts of the body quite well by now, but Hux points anyway. “You’re limping. Hurt? Injured?” 

“No.” Kylo returns his full weight to right foot as if to prove this. He doesn’t wince, his eyes hard. 

“Why?” Hux asks. He points to the window and then throws out his arms. There’s little relief in allowing his exasperation to finally become evident. He’s been dreading the end of their marriage’s initial period of unquestioning acceptance, but he will not spend another night wondering if Kylo has dragged himself off to die in the woods. “Why, Kylo? Why do you do this?” 

Kylo grunts and walks to the bed. He sits and then flops down onto his back, rubbing at his eyes, maybe expecting Hux to crawl onto him and offer comfort. Hux stays in place, waiting for an answer. He could see the understanding in Kylo’s eyes when he heard the question. 

“Strong,” Kylo says, making one of his hands into a fist. He punches an invisible enemy. “Yes?”

“No. You look weakened, if anything. You’re training? With whom? Why do you go alone?”

Hux knows these questions were too quick and too varied, but he lets them hang in the air anyway, resisting the urge to pity Kylo when confusion softens his brow. 

“Power,” Kylo says. He pronounces this with reverent caution. It’s the Eastern word Hux came up with for Kylo’s supernatural abilities, and it feels too small. “Magic person,” Kylo says, a term that’s more like an endearment, and he points to his chest. Then he points to the window. 

“There’s another magic person?” Hux says, jealous before he’s concerned. “In the forest?”

“Yes.” Kylo sits up, nodding. He’s always excited when Hux understands him. “Master.”

“Master?”

Kylo knew that word prior to Hux’s language lessons, assuming it means the same thing in the East, and he shrinks when he hears it from Hux now, as if he’s told someone else’s secret. Hux thinks of the ghoul from his dream, only because it had seemed a thing that came from the deepest woods. 

“Does the Queen know?” he asks. 

“Queen-- Mother? No, no. Mhmm--” Kylo drags his hand through his hair, which is dirty, bits of dead leaves tumbling out onto their sheets. “Private,” Kylo says, whirling to Hux when he’s come up with the word they use for their conversations in the Eastern tongue, and for what they do in bed, which Hux has tried to frame as something that should not be discussed in detail with Kylo’s hunting friends. “Very, very,” Kylo says. He tends to lean on this word somewhat inaccurately when he tries to issue commands. “Very private, the Master.” 

“Am I the only one who knows?” Hux asks, taken aback.

Kylo just stares at him, looking tired and wounded, until Hux can’t resist any longer. He moves closer, grunting in annoyance as he gathers up the leaf bits from their bedsheets. Kylo swoons toward him with a sigh and puts his head on Hux’s shoulder, his face warm against the side of Hux’s neck. 

“I don’t like it,” Hux says. A useful refrain that Kylo knows from bed, though Hux employs it far more often at mealtimes. 

“Don’t like it?” Kylo says, taking the dead leaves from Hux’s hand. 

“Not just the dirt. The-- This.” Hux points to the window. “You, going. Leaving me alone. Coming back--” He searches for a word Kylo might be familiar with. “Hurt,” he says, though Kylo will deny that he has been.

“Not hurt,” Kylo says. Something dark pools in his eyes when he holds Hux’s gaze after saying so, as if this is a command. “Master helps.” 

“I don’t like it,” Hux says again, more weakly now. Kylo sighs and leans in to kiss him. Hux is too tired and too glad to have him back: he might have resisted, but instead he parts his lips for Kylo’s tongue and sighs into his mouth. 

“Strong,” Kylo whispers against Hux’s lips, squeezing his biceps. “Good, magic, more, yes? Hux?” 

Hux smirks at the use of his surname in bed. This is according to his own design, as he hates his first name. Kylo smiles, too, and seems to think the matter is settled. Hux pulls away when Kylo tries to draw him down to the mattress. 

“You’re filthy,” Hux says, pointing to the bath. 

“Filthy,” Kylo repeats, smiling again, because Hux used that word when Kylo first tongued his ass, and still says it when things take a certain turn in bed, differently now: _filthy, you’re a filthy boy-- doing that to me, liking it so much_. Encouraging him. 

“Bad word choice,” Hux says when Kylo tries to swoon in for another kiss. It’s rare that he’s so amorous after returning from the woods. Usually he’s like a frightened child, but Hux’s attempt at interrogation seems to have inspired him to rally. Hux points to the bath again. “Clean up,” Hux says, as if he’s not going to follow Kylo into the hot water and help. Hux could use a soak, anyway. The chill that crept beneath his skin during the night lingers, despite the warmth of Kylo’s affection. 

The heat of the water renews Kylo’s exhaustion, and he’s lolling in Hux’s soapy hands before long, his eyelids heavy and his cock soft even when Hux gives it a tug in pretense of cleaning him there. They often have slow, sleepy sex in the mornings, when Kylo isn’t required to be elsewhere, but never after one of these nights in the forest has Kylo been able to get it up. Further reason for concern, Hux thinks. 

After the bath, Kylo sleeps in Hux’s arms like a baby. Hux is tired, too, but he stares at the window, glaring at it as the sun climbs higher in the sky outside. He needs to learn more about the discipline of Kylo’s particular magic before he styles this Master figure as an enemy, but his instincts are all screaming that the term ‘enemy’ isn’t strong enough for what this secret loyalty represents, unknown even to the Queen. Hux tries to tell himself that it’s a good sign that Kylo has been somewhat honest about it with him, but he’s inclined to think this confidence was simply inevitable, as they share a bed now.

Weeks pass without another trip to the forest, and the weather grows cooler. Hux awaits word from his father, not even sure what form that might take, and begins to understand that the village where the royal family resides is a fortress, the most eastern part of their territory that abuts the neutral zone. It’s considered a privilege to defend this vulnerable place, and as it seems that the royal line possesses the magic powers necessary to do so, it’s also practical for them to live where a well-trained army would be placed in Hux’s homeland. It dizzies him sometimes to think about how useful Kylo is to his people, almost a god-like figure in his importance, and yet he walks among them as if he’s a common foot soldier, and kills the beasts that end up on communal tables. As Hux’s understanding of Kylo grows, his hopeless love solidifies, making him stupid and even wet-eyed at times, sometimes angry about what Kylo has done to him. It’s so irreversible, and much stronger than the physical attachment Brendol warned him about. 

Hux wants Kylo to know about him, too, and sometimes just talks at him in bed, imagining that Kylo understands on some deeper level, even if he misses the meaning of half the words or more.

“I suppose you know I’m a second wife’s son,” Hux says one night after a particularly blistering series of orgasms that left Kylo near tears and Hux’s exhausted body singing with a kind of residual energy that has put him in a confessional mood. “I’ve noticed you don’t do that here,” Hux says, scooting closer when Kylo huddles around him and smoothes his hair down, sniffling. “But my father has four wives, currently. My older brother is from the first marriage, and he’ll rule in the East when Brendol dies. I was only good enough to be traded for favor-- My mother came from low blood, and even the third wife called her a concubine. You wouldn’t think it, looking at me, but my mother is very beautiful, and my father was therefore so enamored of her that he ignored the normal social order of things when he made her his spouse. That was after she was visibly pregnant with me, they say.” 

Hux feels a swell of intangible comfort wrapping around him like a very soft blanket, maybe only in his imagination, though it occurs to him that it could be related to Kylo’s powers. Kylo’s eyes are still a bit watery, his thumb moving on Hux’s cheek. Hux is sex-drunk and love-poisoned, but he feels understood, safe, and victorious, as if he’s been waiting to say all of this without shame since he was old enough to understand that he isn’t as special as his brother and that people actually dare to say bad things about his mother, who in Hux’s view is beyond reproach, a complete success story who went from peeling carrots in the kitchens to wearing a modest crown, and secretly Brendol’s favorite even now. 

Hux says some of this to Kylo, muttering it into the warm space between them. Kylo kisses him and whispers some words that Hux is relatively sure mean _beautiful_ , and possibly _little fox_ , though he may be translating incorrectly. Hux turns red anyway, and closes his eyes when Kylo licks his hot cheeks. 

“I love you,” Hux says, sternly, when he opens his eyes again. “Do you know what that means? In my language?”

“Tell me,” Kylo says, though something about this breathless request makes Hux suspect he does know.

Hux had felt as if the answer would tumble out of him like the rest of his words have tonight, but suddenly his mouth is dry, his mind fuzzy. He puts his hand on Kylo’s cheek and thinks of their dry wedding vows, when they promised only to not betray each other. 

“It means you make me feel like the person I always should have known I was,” Hux says, his fingers twitching on Kylo’s earnest face. “And that if you disappeared, it would destroy me.” 

“No, no,” Kylo says, his hand sliding up over Hux’s. “Destroy you? No-- Anything-- Any _body_ \--” He grunts, frustrated, and seems to make a vow in his own language. Hux catches enough familiar words to suspect that he knows what it was: that anyone who tries to destroy Hux will have to answer to the full strength of Kylo’s wrath. “Are you mine,” Kylo says, firmly, all the dampness gone out of his gaze now. It’s not a question when he says it like that, but Hux nods in answer anyway, and kisses him. 

On the morning after the first dusting of snow has blanketed the village, Kylo again invites Hux to hunt with him. Hux dresses in a gloomy mood, expecting this to mean that the rest of the group will be waiting at the end of the path, ready to snicker at Hux’s efforts with the bow, but no one awaits, and they ride toward the forest alone. 

“Just us?” Hux says as they cross the tree line. “You and me only?” he says when Kylo looks over at him. 

“Only,” Kylo says, and he grins. “Only you.”

Hux is elated, and he tries not to beam like a child who has been promised sweets. He’s been wanting this for weeks, not sure how to ask for it. His delight fades somewhat when he wonders if he’ll be introduced to Kylo’s mysterious Master on this outing. 

They ride deeper into the forest without speaking, Hux nudging his horse along the trail behind Kylo’s. The horse was a gift from Kylo, like the bow and arrow, a sleek gray mare with dark spots on her hindquarters. Leia explained that Hux could give her a name, but she’d been called Tasi before she belonged to him, and he calls her that still. He’s been grateful that in his home life with Kylo he’s been allowed to keep the name that feels like his own, even if, on a parchment record in some official register, he’s been marked down in history as someone called Armitage Organa. 

Kylo is patient with Hux during the hunt. It’s much easier to keep perfectly quiet when it’s just the two of them under the dense tree cover, a glitter of snow dusting down from the pines overhead here and there. They leave the horses tied at their camp and move carefully over the surrounding terrain on foot. Without the anxiety of wondering what the others will think of his every foreign move, Hux is able to appreciate the beauty of these woods, different but not completely dissimilar from the ones he knew only peripherally at home. Birds flit overhead, but they are after something bigger. Snow sparkles under their boots. Kylo is shirtless as usual, untouched by the cold. Hux tries not to look too long or want too much, only half a day removed from the last time they had each other. This is serious; he wants to respect it, and does not allow his mind to wander to thoughts of the tent they pitched at camp and how they might celebrate a successful hunt within it. 

Kylo finds the boar. Maybe he even lured it with his powers. Hux isn’t sure if those powers extend to wild animals, but if Kylo can use them to sense an approaching army, it seems likely enough that his simpler-minded prey might fall victim. Regardless, Hux aims the bow himself, his arms shaking as Kylo whispers in his ear, telling him to wait, wait, just a moment longer. Hux would be hard in his pants if he wasn’t so tense and afraid to miss his shot. The boar shuffles through the clearing ahead of them: snorting, oblivious. Hux spares a thought for the soldiers from the East who might have been so arrogantly comfortable in these woods just before being pierced by Kylo’s blade. His knees shake. 

“Now,” Kylo whispers, barely audible, his lips brushing Hux’s ear. Hux feels it like a command that has originated from the earth, rising up through his body and finally into his arms. The arrow sears through the air like a spell, almost invisible when in motion, and then into the boar. Kylo whoops in celebration and shakes Hux by his shoulders. The boar screams, bleeds, stumbles sideways and falls. “Yes, yes, yes,” Kylo is saying, hugging Hux from behind now. “Good! So good, Hux, so good.” 

Hux laughs and shivers with pride, turning his cheek into Kylo’s sloppy kiss. He’s not hard, but still feels ridiculously aroused, because that’s what Kylo has learned to say to him in bed: _good, Hux, so good_. 

Kylo carries the dead animal back to camp on his shoulders. He’s a bloody mess by the time they get there, and instead of washing himself in the stream nearby he pulls out his knife to butcher the boar straight away. Hux understands then that they’ll be here overnight, and he’s glad, though still anxious about where Kylo’s so-called Master might be lurking. 

“Could we do it with these?” Hux asks, taking his daggers from his coat and squatting beside Kylo before he’s gotten very far with the skinning. “Could you show me?” he asks when Kylo looks up. 

Kylo doesn’t grin as if this is cute, and doesn’t hesitate once he’s grasped what Hux is asking for. He crouches behind Hux and shows him how to use the dagger that came from Hux’s mother to separate the skin from the meat, grunting and stilling Hux’s hand whenever he moves too quickly. Kylo’s breath is hot against Hux’s cheek, and Hux has begun to sweat under his clothes, though he’s removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves. When the skin comes away cleanly, Hux is so pleased by the sensation that he exhales in a choppy rush, imagining this dirty pelt transforming into leather, then into sheathes for his knives. He uses the dagger from his father to cut the boar open as Kylo indicates. They remove organs, Hux working methodically as Kylo shows him how. They’re both soaked in blood by the time it’s done, breathing heavily. Kylo rises to his feet and wipes some sweat from his jaw, leaving a smear of blood in its place. Hux sits on his knees and peers up at him, waiting to be told, like he’s always been told, usually with some measure of condescending surprise, that he’s a good student.

“I love you,” Kylo says, pronouncing the words carefully and with grave seriousness, the way that Hux had, as if this is a heavy mantle that Hux will have to wear. “Do you-- Understand?”

“Yes,” Hux says. His breath hitches, and he feels light enough to float off the ground but also unable to stand. The smell of blood and snow and wet pine needles is like a drug that clears his head instead of muddling it, sharpening over his skin when he inhales deeply. He walks forward on his knees as his eyes creep downward and he sees the increasingly obvious outline of Kylo’s cock in his pants, hard along his thigh.

 _Low blood_ , Hux thinks when he tugs Kylo’s pants down. Not wanting to get the boar’s blood on Kylo’s cock, he rubs his face on it instead, reveling in Kylo’s small, astonished gasp. Hux had let the people who spoke of low blood torment him all his life, had allowed those two words to seep into him and crystallize like proof of a prophecy of failure. Now he repeats them like a mantra in his head as he takes Kylo’s cock into his mouth, stroking that sentiment like a fine pelt that he intends to wear with pride. 

They haven’t done this yet; Kylo gasps again and stutters out a blunt word that’s new to Hux. His blood-tacky hand slides into Hux’s hair, and Hux presses down, down onto him, until he chokes, still wanting more. Hux’s mouth aches, his knees are screaming, and he’s hot all over, despite the weather. It’s wonderful. He’s drooling, moaning, holding onto his husband’s massive thighs while he bobs his head and shows him more and more of his true barbarian self. Kylo shapes a sigh around Hux’s name and strokes his hair with answering worship.

They’ve tasted each other’s come already, just a bit, but Hux is unprepared for the volume of what he now tries and tries to swallow. Some slips from his lips when he finally pulls off, but Kylo doesn’t seem to mind. He drops to his knees and kisses it off of Hux’s chin, the long moan that he unleashed when he came still tapering off at the back of his throat. 

“The tent,” Kylo says hotly, grabbing Hux’s cock through his trousers. Hux isn’t sure why Kylo is feeling suddenly modest, but once they’ve crawled into the tent he understands. Kylo tugs his pants down over the tops of his boots and spreads his legs for Hux, showing him his spent cock, then lifting his hips to show more. “Please,” Kylo says when Hux hesitates, his hand on his belt. “Please, this feels good.” 

Hux snorts, because Kylo may be getting a little ahead of himself there, unless he’s referring to what appears to be submission, generally. They haven’t switched positions yet. Hux was told that Western warriors wouldn’t expect to receive. Now he sees that Kylo has been wanting it, maybe afraid to ask: he looks desperate, his chest heaving as he reaches down to spread himself the way Hux did that first night, when Kylo hesitated with the same sort of slow, stunned look on his face that Hux is sure he’s sporting now.

“We’d need--”

Before Hux can finish, a tightly wrapped bundle rolls from Kylo’s rucksack and into his hand. Kylo holds it up, frowning a little when he sees how wide Hux’s eyes have gotten. 

“Did you just--” Hux says, looking from the rucksack to the bundle, which Kylo seems to have summoned with his powers. 

“Hux,” Kylo says, pressing the bundle into his hand. “Please.” 

Hux unwraps the bundle with shaking hands, revealing the bottle of oil that usually resides on the table by their bed. He uncaps it, dips his fingers in and winces when this tarnishes the oil with a residue of boar’s blood. But perhaps that’s what Kylo wants, and why he’s asking for this now, while they’re both still filthy, Hux wearing his barbarian colors from his hands to his elbows. Hux licks his lips, tasting the salt of Kylo’s come there, and drags his slick fingertips over this last untouched part of him. 

Kylo’s noises are unbelievable, so much more unrestrained than his low growling when he plunges into Hux. He seems almost drunk, and Hux begins to feel it, too, when he takes his cock out and tries to accept the fact that he’s been asked to put it inside this person who barely fits in their tent, who summons inanimate objects at will, and maybe animate ones, too, and who loves Hux when he’s caked in blood and on his knees. Kylo, who sees the blazing truth in Hux coming to the surface at last and wants it inside him, too. 

“So tight,” Hux murmurs when he’s all in, wondering if Kylo said this about him, too. He’d thought he’d understood when he felt it around his fingers, but this is different, almost too much, and the heat inside Kylo makes him feel faint and small, swallowed whole. 

“Hux,” Kylo says, groping for him. He’s still wearing his boots and his pants, which are pushed down to his calves and tucked around Hux’s back like a trap that Kylo has caught him in. And this is what Kylo wants from his captive. Hux moans and slips into thoughtless reverie after just a few shallow thrusts, his stomach trembling against Kylo’s as he presses forward to kiss him and brush the hair that’s stuck to his face away. 

“Feels good?” Hux asks, whispering. Kylo moans and arches his back, undulating like an earthquake beneath Hux and all around him, clenching tighter. Hux takes that as a yes. The sweat that he licks from Kylo’s jaw is blood-tinged. 

Having nearly come in his pants just from sucking Kylo’s cock, Hux can’t last long now. He moves carefully but imagines fucking Kylo hard, eventually, how Kylo would take it and take it and throw back his head, wanting more. The thought makes Hux moan and snap his hips, still just shallowly, his face pressed snug to Kylo’s throat. He can feel Kylo’s wild heartbeat thudding against his chest, and he thinks of the boar’s heart, how strangely gentle a thing it seemed when he passed it from his palms and into Kylo’s. It makes his eyes wet now, for reasons he could not hope to fit words to in any language.

Being the one who does the thrusting is far more tiring than Hux expected, especially after the long day spent riding and hunting and squatting over the boar’s carcass. He’s exhausted by the time he’s emptied himself into Kylo, slumped onto his side on their thin bedroll as soon as he’s slipped free of him. Kylo is attendant, as if Hux is the one who was just made vulnerable, kissing his ear and leaving the tent to fetch the small bucket they used for the boar’s blood to the stream. He cleans it there and returns it to Hux, now filled with water that’s been heated by his powers. This is accompanied by a rag that Hux uses to mop the blood off his arms, face and neck while Kylo moves about their camp completely naked, doing various chores. Hux watches him sleepily through the half-open tent flap. Kylo has removed everything but his leather armbands, not even bothering with his boots as he packs up the majority of the boar meat, hangs it from a tree, and then constructs a fire and a spit to roast two pieces he’s set aside: the loin and the heart. Kylo cleans himself at the stream only when all of this is accomplished, not bothering to heat the water. The light is fading rapidly from the sky, behind the snow-heavy pines. 

“You’re amazing,” Hux says when Kylo returns to the tent to at last put on a clean pair of lightweight breeches. Kylo seems to miss the weight of this compliment, giving Hux only a mild glance as he passes him a fresh tunic and a pair of woolen socks that are long enough to nearly reach Hux’s knees when he pulls them on. 

“Hungry?” Kylo asks. Hux can smell the meat cooking. He nods and pulls Kylo to him for a kiss, hoping Kylo will taste his amazement, at least. Hux isn’t sure if he has, but Kylo is smiling when he picks some dried blood from Hux’s fringe, neatening his hair in a way that makes Hux feel overly warm, despite the drop in temperature that comes as darkness falls. 

Hux puts his coat on when he leaves the tent, and he sits very close to Kylo beside the fire, eating meat with his hands. They save the heart for last, and Hux gets the sense that its consumption is symbolic, in honor of his first successful hunt or maybe in honor of the boar. Kylo pulls out a flask filled with a dark, heavy wine that tastes good in contrast to the flavors of the meat, though Hux sips from it only cautiously as the woods go completely black around them. He huddles against Kylo’s side and glances around the clearing, increasingly afraid that they are waiting for someone here.

“Will your Master come?” he finally asks when Kylo has tucked him into a drowsy embrace, the fire beginning to burn down. 

“Master?” Kylo’s expression snaps alert at the sound of that word, and he frowns. 

Hux nods. “Doesn’t he live out here, or whatever? This is where you meet him. I recognize the smell of these woods. You always have it on you when you return-- From him.”

Hux has spoken too quickly, his nervous dread increasing as Kylo continues staring at him in silence, studying his face. 

“Only you,” Kylo says. He makes a circle with his finger, indicating their campsite, as if it’s been enchanted to disallow entry to anyone else. “Master-- He sees-- Only me.” 

“Okay,” Hux says, sorry he asked. “Tent?” he says, pointing. “I’m cold.” 

Kylo puts furs over their horses’ backs before bringing two more into the tent. He wraps Hux into them on the bedroll, warming him far more effectively with the heat from his body when they cling to each other. Hux had been in mind of sleep, but as soon as he feels Kylo’s bare thighs sliding against his and parts his lips for wine-soaked kisses he wants more, and this time he opens his legs for Kylo under the furs, groaning with satiation when he’s stuffed full, still tilting his hips up to try to get even more of Kylo into him. His thighs are wet with Kylo’s come when he turns over to sleep, pulling Kylo’s arm across his chest, and there is blood still lodged under his fingernails. He feels like a happy animal tucked into his den deep in the woods, protected by the king of the forest. 

“Thank you,” he manages to say just before sleep, already drooling onto Kylo’s bicep. 

“Thank you,” Kylo whispers back, and he’s gnawing softly at Hux’s earlobe when Hux drifts into a comfortably well-won sleep.

Hux sleeps for some time; he can’t be sure how long. Then he wakes to find the ghoul staring at him, hissing from the mouth of the tent, eyes void of all but hatred and teeth bared. Kylo is gone somewhere-- taken by this thing, bound up, intentionally confused so Hux will be left vulnerable, his powers muzzled by this stronger, bleaker force that wants nothing but to rip the world to shreds for its pleasure.

When he actually wakes he’s thrashing, making a horrible bereft sound and hardly able to focus on Kylo’s attempts to calm him as he slowly begins to understand that it was a nightmare.

Only it didn’t feel that way at all. It felt like a second warning, and when Hux shivers in Kylo’s arms he fears he won’t have the privilege of a third. 

“What does your Master look like?” Hux asks, his voice unsteady when he peers up at Kylo, who murmurs comfort against Hux’s cheeks in his native tongue, too shaken to translate. 

“Master?” Kylo seems disturbed by this second mention of him. Well, good: Hux is plenty disturbed himself, the bad feelings he associates with any mention of this person growing and multiplying within him, developing into a fear-sharpened clarity that might fade in the morning. It’s still pitch black outside, the farthest point of night between the previous day and the next one. Their little tent feels like a tiny ship out on a vast, unfriendly sea, very far from both shores.

“What does he look like?” Hux asks, pointing to his own face. “Does he have long hair, like yours?” Hux asks, grasping a handful of Kylo’s silky locks. The ghoul in his dreams is bald as a stone. “Is he a man? Or-- Some creature?”

Hux points to his face again, his breathing beginning to calm as Kylo strokes his back. Kylo is frowning. He touches Hux’s face, soothing his callused fingers over Hux’s cheek. It’s a gentle touch, but there’s something scolding in it, too, as if he’s telling Hux to stop having this reaction. 

“What does he look like?” Hux asks firmly, pulling Kylo’s hand away. “Your Master’s _face_ , Kylo. I need to know.” 

“Face looks-- old?” Kylo shrugs. “Hux won’t be hurt,” he says, as if he’s repeating some promise another person made to him. It makes Hux shiver, and he settles back down into the mound of furs, his heart still slamming. He won’t be able to sleep again, out here. 

Kylo seems wakeful in the aftermath, too, and he pets Hux’s shoulder, kisses the side of his neck. Hux closes his eyes and tells himself that soon their ability to communicate will improve, and he’ll have more answers. He tries to believe that will happen soon enough to prevent the disaster that he feels he can smell on the air now, cold as the coming winter. Behind his eyelids, he sees the hissing face of the ghoul again, and he rolls over to snuggle into Kylo’s chest. 

“Safe now,” Kylo says, whispering. “Hux is safe, here.” 

Hux doesn’t like the ‘now’ or the ‘here’ in these statements, as if he wasn’t safe in the recent past, and wouldn’t be safe outside the circle of Kylo’s arms. He wants to ask if he’s still safe on those nights when Kylo disappears from their bed, in the intervening hours before he comes back ragged and dirt-smeared, but he’s afraid he already knows the answer.

Just two days after they return from their overnight hunting trip, while the boar’s hide is still tanning in some craftsman’s workshop, Hux overhears the word ‘Master’ from someone other than Kylo, his ears instantly perking up as he whirls toward the speaker at the communal dinner table. It’s the royal father, speaking to the Queen and muttering in his usual way. The Queen gives him a look that shuts him up, and then she notices Hux staring. Kylo is oblivious when Hux turns back to him, listening to one of the guards tell a story about a comrade who once survived being caught in a blizzard by sleeping in the belly of a freshly killed horse. It’s hardly the sort of topic that should be brought up over dinner, in Hux’s opinion, but indicative of the recent rumors that a bad snowstorm might be on the way. 

Hux tracks the Queen’s movements after dinner as she makes her usual rounds with her subjects. When Kylo leaves the hall with some guards who want his assistance with lighting the protective torches on the village’s sentry towers, Hux says he’ll meet him back at the house and slips through the crowd toward the Queen. 

“Could I trouble you with a question?” Hux asks when she’s left one table and turned toward another. 

“Doesn’t that inquiry mean that you already have?” Leia says, and she smiles in her usual way, teasing but warm. Hux doesn’t like the duality of it, but forces a smile of his own when she places a hand on his shoulder. “Of course,” she says, leading him away from onlookers. “I hope everything is satisfactory in your household?”

“Yes, we’re both well.” Hux imagines he can feel her scrutinizing him, trying to suss out the source of the tension in his voice and the dark circles under his eyes. He hasn’t slept properly since that night in the woods. 

“Ben seems happy,” Leia says when they’ve installed themselves across the room from the remaining diners, in a shadowy place between two fat candles that are mounted on wall sconces. “Perhaps happier than I have ever seen him.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Hux says. 

“And what was your question?” she asks, casting a distracted glance across the room.

“I heard the royal father use the word ‘master’ at the dinner table. Forgive me, but-- I just wanted to confirm that this word means the same thing here that it does in the East. I know we share a few words, between our cultures--” 

“And you couldn’t ask this of Mitaka?” Leia says, her attention focused solely on Hux now. 

“I-- It’s just-- It’s a word I’ve heard Kylo use,” Hux says, beginning to regret this desperate outreach. He hears his father’s voice in his head, telling him not to trust the Queen. 

She sighs. “My brother,” she says. “He was Ben’s teacher once, in mastering the powers that our family has been gifted with. It can also be a curse. For Ben, I think, it often felt that way, when he was younger. He struggled somewhat with Luke’s instruction.” 

“Luke. Your brother?” 

“Yes. There was an argument-- Old family history. But Luke is on his way back, according to a communication I’ve received. My husband worries it will reopen old wounds. I think he underestimates the peace Ben has found in his marriage to you.” 

Hux is humbled by that, to the point of blushing. 

“I’m not surprised to hear that he’s tried to confide in you this way,” Leia says. “I know it still troubles him, the way things ended when Luke left the village. That was five years ago, and Ben doesn’t know yet that Luke will be back. Please, would you let me be the one to inform him?”

“Of course,” Hux says. He’s eager to be away from her now; she clearly has no idea that Kylo has found a new master in the woods, and Hux can’t shake the feeling that Kylo would be in bad trouble if she found out, though he also lives in fear that Kylo is in bad trouble anyway. “Thank you,” Hux says, backing away. “I’ll be heading home now. I won’t mention anything about your brother.” 

Hux keeps his promise to her, mostly because he doesn’t want to admit to Kylo that he asked his mother about his history with masters. He doesn’t like holding this secret, and is doubly encumbered when a message arrives from Brendol not long thereafter, stuffed under Tasi’s saddle with the royal seal of the East intact. Hux assumes the letter was put there by some paid-off tradesman, as the last market of the season had closed the day before, all the visiting merchants heading back east into the neutral zone. Despite this effort to get the letter to Hux in secret, its contents are still cautiously vague, as Hux expected. 

_Armitage-- I hope this correspondence finds you well. I trust that you are doing all you can to be useful in your new surroundings. In the early summer we shall make arrangements to see you. Remember to keep abreast of your surroundings at all times. The western lands are surrounded by beasts who sometimes wander into the villages. Your mother worries about you, and I remind her that you are the cleverest of all my children, and that I would only send such a clever son into a land where beasts might encroach. Use their feasts of winter to pad your narrow bones, and mind all you were told before you left home. By the Thickness of Our Blood I Remain, Your Father, B.A.H. VI (d.a.r.)_

Hux studies this letter as an encoded message, knowing that to be his father’s way. He also knows that the ‘d.a.r.’ means that he’s been instructed to destroy the letter after reading, but he spends some days sneaking glances at it when Kylo is out, and when he tosses it into the kitchen fire he’s still puzzled about several clues. Certainly the reference to ‘beasts’ isn’t actually a warning about wild animals, and the note about visiting in early summer can’t be taken at face value either. Mostly, watching the letter burn to ash as he sits glumly at the kitchen hearth, this communication makes Hux miss his mother. Brendol is surely plotting something, but Hux isn’t sure how much concern he needs to allocate to his father’s schemes at present. He’s more worried about the menace that seems to lurk more closely, especially when he wakes on one icy night and again finds himself alone in bed. When Kylo returns at first light he is shaking, blue in the lips, and surly in response to Hux’s worry. 

“Perhaps you could show me some proof that your Master is helping you grow strong,” Hux says, not bothering to hide his own anger after Kylo has snarled at him and moved toward the bathtub, stumbling in his steps. “I see only evidence to the contrary.” 

There are marks on Kylo’s back as if from a whipping, but they’re not normal cuts or scars. They look as if they are the ghosts of some lashing from long ago, not lodged in his skin but hovering over it, like fading burns on a gauzy film that clings to him. 

“Quiet,” Kylo says, leaning over the tub as it fills, his chest heaving. “My head hurts.” 

“That’s not my fault. What’s he done to you? Why does he hide himself away in the woods?”

Hux waits for Kylo to process these questions, relatively confident that they will all be understood well enough. Since winter has thickened around the village, communal activity has quieted and they have spent long days indoors together, Kylo’s fluency increasing dramatically as Hux continues his lessons and remains more talkative with him than he ever was at home, even with his mother. 

“Do you love him more than me?” Hux asks when Kylo doesn’t respond, sulking over the bathwater as if he might pass out into it. 

Kylo turns, stricken. “What?” he says, though it’s clear in his expression that he understood. 

“Your Master. That term implies intense devotion, and you run to him despite my protests. So he is your true ally, above me.” 

Kylo turns away from Hux. This feels like an answer, as if Kylo has called Hux’s bluff. Hux holds his breath and braces himself to withdraw, though to where he can’t imagine. His father didn’t warn him not to mistake the physical marriage bond for true devotion, or that he might become foolish enough to believe he had found his rightful place in the world with Kylo Ren, in this village that serves as a fortress against his own people. Brendol the Fierce would never have even indulged that as a possibility. He expected more, even from his lowest blood.

Kylo sinks to his knees, puts his hands over his face and sobs. Hux exhales but otherwise remains frozen in bed, now even less sure how to interpret this as an answer to his question. Kylo says something in his own language that Hux roughly and perhaps imperfectly translates to _I’m being torn apart_. 

“Darling,” Hux says, because that’s what his mother called him when he was a little boy, when he’d cried. It’s automatic and embarrassing, but Kylo won’t have understood anyway. Hux flings the blankets away and hurries to him, crouching down behind him and gasping when he feels how cold Kylo’s shoulders are, as if suddenly he’s made of stone. The marks on his skin have vanished, or perhaps Hux only imagined them.

“Sorry,” Kylo says, showing Hux his wet face. “Hux. I’m sorry, sorry.” 

“What’s happened?” Hux asks. He smoothes his thumbs over Kylo’s cheeks, wiping away tears. Kylo’s face is warm, at least. 

“No,” Kylo says, shaking his head. “Nothing. You’re safe, we’re safe. I’m sorry.” 

He crumples into Hux’s arms as the tub continues to fill. Kylo’s hair has bits of frost in it, clinging to the ends at the back, and the crying he’s doing is mostly silent, jumping through his body like a thing he keeps trying and failing to swallow. Hux holds him and shushes him, pinching his fingers around the frost in his hair until it melts between them. He tests the bathwater with his hand; it’s still cold. In the state that Kylo is in, Hux wonders if he’ll even be able to heat it. 

“He takes your heat from you?” Hux says when Kylo sits back on his haunches and wipes at his face. 

“Heat?” Kylo says, mumbling. 

“Warm. You’re usually-- So warm, and now. Cold.” Hux touches Kylo’s shoulder, which has heated up a bit now, as if to defy Hux’s concern.

Kylo turns away again, and again Hux is hurt and tempted to pull back himself. It remains true that he has nowhere else to go. For the past months they have been largely undisturbed in their harmony, at each other’s side always and blissfully aligned in spreading their time between sex, language lessons and keeping warm together in the bed. Now, the cold encroaches, and it makes Hux feel more alone than he ever has as he watches Kylo wash the tears from his face with handfuls of water from the tub. 

“Lessons,” Kylo says when he turns back. “He teaches me.” 

“Well, I had assumed as much.” Hux considers bringing up the conversation he had with Leia about Kylo’s past master, but he’s too rattled to imagine that would do anything but make things worse. “And these lessons require you to suffer?”

“Suffer?”

“Hurt.”

“Sometimes.” Kylo turns away again. He lets his hand float in the tub the way he always does when he warms the water. Typically, steam rises from the surface after a few seconds. Tonight, he leaves his hand in place and furrows his brow as if extra concentration is required. “You don’t understand,” Kylo says when he looks at Hux again. It’s a phrase they exchange with relative frequency during their language lessons. 

“I admit that freely,” Hux says. He considers whether he should ask the question he has in mind, and decides he’s waited long enough. “Why is your Master a secret? Why doesn’t your mother know about him?”

“Mother don’t understand.” 

“Doesn’t.” 

“ _Doesn’t_ understand. _They_ don’t understand.” 

“They who? Your family?”

“Family, villagers, nobody.”

“Nobody, eh? But your family-- They have your powers. Your mother does, anyway, and--” Hux hesitates to mention the uncle. “Others must, too?”

Kylo gives the water a sulky stare. Hux tests the temperature, half-interested in joining him for a bath. It’s just lukewarm, and barely that.

“One,” Kylo says. “One did. Understand. She’s gone now.” 

Kylo has overfilled the tub while brooding, and when he climbs in some slops over the side, onto the floor and Hux’s knees. Hux thinks about asking about this understanding woman or girl who is ‘gone now,’ but a strange kind of jealousy makes him hold his questions in, and he feels delirious when he picks up a wash rag and rubs soap onto it before bringing it to Kylo’s back. Kylo is shivering, but only a little now. 

“Are you mine?” Kylo asks, mumbling the question like he’s not sure if he should ask it now. 

“Yes.” Hux thinks of the letter from home, his father’s heavy wax seal, the information about Luke’s return that he still hasn’t shared. He leans forward to kiss Kylo’s wet shoulder, wishing they could know everything about each other. He understands, more than Kylo realizes, why they can’t. “I’m yours,” Hux says when Kylo glances at him. At last, this answer is literal, if not simple. 

The following week marks the anniversary of Alderaan’s long-ago destruction. In the East, they would never publicly observe the memory of a defeat, even in mourning, and Hux is offended by the entire production. It involves a candlelight procession and everyone dressed in white. It’s much too cold to be outdoors, and Hux feels the long stares of resentful elders throughout the evening. He tugs the stupid white fur hat that he’s wearing more snugly over his hair, trying to hide its conspicuous color, as if everyone here doesn’t know who he is and where he came from anyway. 

“What was the point of that?” Hux asks when he’s finally back in the privacy of his home, throwing the white hat into his wardrobe. Kylo is unwrapping white leather straps from his arms, looking nervous about Hux’s mood. “I’m not doing that again next year,” Hux says. “It’s disrespectful to the dead for me to have to stand there like I didn’t grow up celebrating that day at home.” 

“You’re here now,” Kylo says. “One of us.” 

Hux knows better than to argue this, though he also knows that Kylo can tell from the look on his face that he doesn’t think so, precisely. Kylo doesn’t seem especially bothered. He peels off his pants-- the usual ones, mercifully, and not some white imposters-- and takes his boots off with them. Naked, he stretches his arms over his head and gives Hux an expectant look. 

“I don’t want to fuck,” Hux says. “How can you, after all that grim nonsense?”

“My grandfather was a-- betrayer,” Kylo says, as if that answers Hux’s question.

“What?” 

“He let them in. Let them burn Alderaan. His powers-- like mine, they should have stopped Tarkin. But no. He wanted it to burn.” 

“Why?” Hux asks, not sure if he’s supposed to take comfort in this or if it’s intended to further disturb him. 

“Power,” Kylo says. “More powerful to let go.” 

“Let go?” Hux is afraid he understands. He sits on the bed and scoots back toward the pillows, pulls his knees up to his chest. 

“Real power has-- No people.” 

“Oh.” Hux shivers and looks at the frosted window. The ghoul from his dreams is not there. “Surely real power has no husband either, then?” he says when Kylo walks to the bed. 

“Grandfather had a wife,” Kylo says. “Mother’s mother.” 

“And what became of her?”

“He couldn’t-- Save. Save her. Don’t worry,” Kylo says, softly. He kneels onto the mattress and touches Hux’s cheek, looming over him like a great fortress wall. “You’re mine. Nobody takes you. Everything else? Can burn.”

Hux lies awake all night, his eyes on the window while Kylo sleeps behind him. Kylo’s heavy arm is wrapped around him, his breath pushes against Hux’s back, his powerful body keeps Hux warm under the blankets, but Hux isn’t sure that this is any kind of proof that he’s not actually alone. He thinks of his father’s letter. _Mind all you were told before you left home_. He was told that the barbarians have no real loyalty, no true sense of honor, and that he would be able to use this against them when the time came. He presses back against the heat of Kylo’s chest and tries to imagine making the same vow to him. _Everything else can burn_. The words of a madman with a mad, unseen Master. Where would they live with the world on fire? What shelter would burning lands provide for a magic person’s too-human husband? 

Hux plans to follow Kylo into the frozen wood the next time he sneaks away to see his Master, but these plans come to nothing. The nights when Kylo leaves him in bed are the only ones when Hux falls asleep easily, waking when the bedsheets have grown cold, meaning Kylo has been gone half the night already. He considers creeping into the woods alone, trying to follow Kylo’s footsteps through the snow, but every night he loses his nerve, afraid that if he arrives after Kylo has been enchanted by his Master, Kylo will not recognize him. Hux has nightmares about Kylo transforming into a half-beast during these meetings, snarling under his Master’s command as he’s hardened in preparation for the burning of the world. 

Like his plans to follow Kylo away from the village, his intentions to coldly demand answers when Kylo returns never come to anything. Kylo is so broken when he stumbles back into their house, overlaid with psychic wounds that fade from sight but not from memory when he crawls into Hux’s arms, shaking terribly and gripping at him as if only Hux’s body can hold him in the real world until morning. Hux can’t bear hurting him further with scrutiny that will only be met with vague non-answers anyway. 

Hux wants to tell Leia, but he’s afraid she will take Kylo away from him if she knows. He waits for some better course of action to introduce itself, his confidence that he’ll come up with something tattering as the bite of winter softens and melts into a soggy spring. 

What comes instead is crisis. When Luke arrives in the village, bearded and hooded and humorless, a young woman trailing behind him with a heavy pack, Hux can feel Kylo crumbling beside him, even he stands straight and tall, breathing only slightly harder. Hux wants to ask Kylo if he was warned about his former master’s return after all, but he can’t reveal that he knew about it now, or perhaps ever. He can see panic in Kylo’s eyes as more and more people crowd around Luke and the girl, many of them reaching for the girl and most of them drawing back before they touch her, several dropping to their knees. Hux isn’t sure what’s going on, but he can see that Kylo needs to believe he has at least one ally in his husband, now more than ever. 

“You found her!” the royal father shouts, dashing through the crowd. The Queen is not far behind, her eyes wet as she walks toward the girl, who looks slightly frightened as she indulges this reception. 

“Rey,” Leia says, breathless, and she pulls the girl to her, rocks her in her arms. 

Kylo exhales sharply through his nose, just loud enough for Hux alone to notice as the celebration surrounding Rey continues. 

“She’s the one who understands,” Hux says, keeping his voice low. “Isn’t she?”

Kylo whirls on him with a feral expression that softens when he sees that Hux is startled. 

“Ben!” the royal father shouts, waving to Kylo. “Your cousin is back. Luke found her.” He says something else that Hux can’t translate, something like ‘get over here and pretend to be happy.’ 

Kylo walks toward the girl-- Rey, they’re calling her, everyone saying it now. She smiles when she sees Kylo, as if he’s the first person here she truly recognizes. 

“You got so big,” she says, in the Eastern language. 

“So did you,” Kylo says, though she is petite and thin. Hux wonders how young she was when she disappeared from this place. And why she did. 

Rey and Kylo embrace, Rey clinging to Kylo’s middle while he awkwardly pats her shoulder. Luke stares at them, and when his eyes meet Kylo’s there is no mistaking the accusation in them. 

A man comes running through the crowd, wild-eyed. He’s around the Queen’s age, dark-haired, referred to either in title or by name as Wedge. Hux recognizes him from the table adjacent to the royal one in the communal hall, some kind of relative who always looks sad and usually drinks enough wine at dinner to nearly fall asleep at the table. Now he’s as spry as a much younger man, dashing toward Rey and Luke. 

“Daddy!” Rey says, releasing Kylo, her now-unrestrained smile brightening the whole scene like a string of painted lanterns. She’s very beautiful, and there is something beyond physical beauty about her, too. She has a presence, like Kylo, that seems to gather the energy of all the living things that around her, infusing them with or maybe robbing them of a significant strength. A magic person. 

She crumples into Wedge’s arms like a little girl when he reaches her. He weeps and kisses her cheeks as they cling to each other, Wedge talking too fast for Hux to translate. He catches only a few words which are spoken over and over: _my baby_ and _thank you_.

“Where was she?” the royal father asks as Kylo moves away from the scene, his face pale but impassive as he walks back to Hux. The Queen is watching him go.

“We will discuss it,” Luke says. “In private.” 

Kylo takes Hux’s arm and they leave the scene with haste, Hux scrambling a bit to keep up with Kylo’s determined stride. As soon as they’ve entered their house, the front door slams hard behind them, as if blown shut by a strong wind. Hux’s heart is already beating fast after their near-run from the scene of Rey and Luke’s return, and it hammers against his ribs as he watches Kylo kick a chair across the room, his teeth grit and his chest heaving. 

“What’s wrong?” Hux asks. “I don’t understand. You’re angry?”

Kylo kicks another chair, this one crashing against the stove. 

“Stop!” Hux says, approaching him. “You’ll break them.” 

He makes his face hard when Kylo turns to snarl at him, determined not to show that he’s frightened by these developments. 

“Talk to me,” Hux says. “Don’t pretend you can’t understand.” 

“Understand, understand!” Kylo says, shouting this at Hux. “That’s all you say!” 

“Maybe because I so often don’t understand you! And you refuse to explain--”

“Everything changes,” Kylo says, pointing toward the front door, toward the village square. “Rey is back.” 

“So? She seems-- I don’t know, friendly?”

“Her power,” Kylo says, lifting his arm over his head and making a shelf of his hand, up toward the ceiling. “Here.” 

“She’s more powerful than you?”

“Yes.” 

“So what? She’ll use it against you?” 

“Yes!”

“Why? How do you know?” 

“Master has foreseen it.” 

“Oh, has he? He can see the future now? Would you like to know my opinion, husband? Are you listening? Watch my lips. _Fuck_ your Master.”

Kylo rears backward, and Hux realizes that it must have sounded like he just suggested that Kylo do to his Master what he does to Hux in bed. 

“That word means two things in my language,” Hux says. “Sex, or--” He turns and spits on the floor. “Or that. That’s what I mean. _Fuck_ him. He’s bad. He hurts you. You should take your cousin into the woods, and the two of you should kill him.” 

Kylo has gone very still. He hardly seems to be breathing, his eyes cold and unblinking and fixed on Hux’s. Hux doesn’t care, isn’t impressed. He’s ready to kill that ghoul in the woods himself, if it means he can have something here that will last, fireproof against whatever burning Kylo has in mind. 

“You cannot say this,” Kylo says. 

“Too late. I already did. What are you going to do about it?”

Kylo walks forward. His expression is very hard, but there’s something terrified trembling behind this mask. Hux can see it when Kylo is very close, looming over him. They’re both breathing heavily now. Hux isn’t afraid anymore. He’s been waiting to say those things, and for Kylo to really hear them. Now he has. 

Hux wasn’t expecting a kiss, but he opens for it when Kylo laps at him hungrily, and he clings to Kylo’s shoulders when Kylo lifts him off the ground. Kylo doesn’t carry Hux far: just to the table, where he sits Hux down like a sack of grain and pushes his legs apart before kissing him again. Hux is confused, but there is something encouraging in the taste of Kylo’s mouth, and in the way his hands tremble on Hux’s shoulders. It’s as if he wants Hux more because he’s dared to speak against his Master, or like he’s rewarding Hux for that blasphemy, begging without words for Hux to fight for him in some way that he can’t fight for himself. 

Kylo tugs Hux’s shirt open and then rips it off entirely, throwing it aside and leaning onto Hux, pressing his back to the table. He moves from kissing Hux’s mouth to his neck, then down to his nipples, grunting with what sounds like approval when Hux gasps and arches for him, hard in his pants as he wraps his legs around Kylo’s back. Soon they’re looped over Kylo’s shoulders as he sucks at the soft skin on Hux’s belly, one big hand kneading Hux’s erection until he whines. 

“Fuck me,” Hux says, staring down between his legs at Kylo, who lifts his gaze to Hux’s. His eyes are dark and somehow also bright, like inky jewels. 

“Fuck you,” Kylo says, yanking at Hux’s belt. “Yes.” 

He seems enraged by an influx of new admiration for Hux, some new kind of attraction that he didn’t want to feel, and he handles Hux as if he’s both a threat and a salvation. His teeth drag over the insides of Hux’s thighs as he tugs Hux’s pants down, ripping them off impatiently but then kneeling at Hux’s feet to remove his boots with care, his fingers sliding gently over Hux’s calves as he peels his socks away. Kylo steps back to take off his own pants while Hux waits, naked and spread open for him on the table, panting. Hux’s cock is leaking, his hands twitching with the urge to stroke it. He feels like that’s not allowed, as if his exposed skin is a limited resource and Kylo’s hands have a more urgent need of it.

“Fuck me like you’re not some old man’s pet,” Hux says, wanting to provoke him further and barely able to keep his voice steady as he does. “Like I’m not the one who will have to put you back together the next time he breaks you.” 

Kylo has understood the sentiment, if not all the words. His eyes flash, showing Hux the fire that lives in him, the one that could burn down the world. He holds his hand out, summoning a jar of kitchen oil that hits his hand hard, the cork popping off. 

“Hold it,” Kylo says, digging two fingers into the oil. 

“What?” 

“The table. Hold it.” 

_Brace yourself_ , he’s saying. Hux smirks and spreads his arms, grabbing both sides of the table. He has grown so tired of falling two steps behind Kylo; he didn’t marry a barbarian to trail him in confusion. He wants to be inside any tornado of chaos Kylo has stirred from the earth, riding it with him. 

Kylo doesn’t bother with fingers or his tongue. He slicks his cock and slides into Hux in one long, relentless push. Not slow or fast but steady, he watches Hux’s face as he takes and takes until all of Kylo is buried in him. Hux spreads himself wider and hitches his hips up greedily, so full that his breath has shallowed but still wanting something more, more. He tightens his grip on the table when Kylo pulls back and snaps back in with a grunt, his hands settling over Hux’s knees. 

“Tell me,” Kylo says. “Speak.” 

They’ve done this before; language lessons during sex are incredibly effective, Hux has found. But there’s something different in the request now, as if Kylo is asking Hux to perform, to show him something real. 

“Feels good,” Hux says, clenching around Kylo’s next thrust. “So deep, like that. Got me open so wide.” 

Hux isn’t exactly a poet when he pants like this for how good Kylo feels inside him, and he can’t think straight when Kylo fucks him harder, knocking him down against the table when he tries to tilt up against every snap of Kylo’s hips. 

“More,” Kylo says, slowing his thrusts when Hux’s words dissolve into moans. 

“I need you,” Hux says, without thinking. He closes his eyes, throws his head back and whimpers. “Need you-- Harder, please.” 

“What do you need.” 

“Need you to fuck me, spill inside me--” 

“What do you need, Hux.” 

Hux whines and throws his arm over his face. He doesn’t resist when Kylo reaches up to pull it away, exposing his blush. Kylo drags Hux forward, leans over him and fucks into him a little harder, not hard enough. 

“What do you need,” Kylo says, his eyes burning down into Hux’s in a way that makes him understand: this fire won’t consume him, but it’s already burned down whole cities inside Kylo, moving here and there and taking whatever it wants of him. 

“Ruin me,” Hux says, the words cracking out of him like snapped bones. “Take me with you. Wherever you’re going. I don’t care. Take me, _take me_ , Kylo, please, don’t leave me alone--”

Kylo scoops Hux off the table, holding him just over it while he fucks into him hard enough to unseat the last of Hux’s thought process, sending it over a cliff and making him shout in wordless pleasure, his whole body bowing as if he’s boneless, and maybe he is. He feels unmade in Kylo’s arms, and rescued, weightless, opened up like a heavy cloud. His face is wet and his back is slick with sweat against Kylo’s supporting arms. When he comes he feels like they’re both suspended in mid-air, the edges of the world unraveling for them. 

“Please,” Hux says, his voice ragged. He wants it to feel like a promise when Kylo comes inside him. “Please, please. Answer me. Tell me.” 

“Can’t--” Kylo says, or maybe it’s another word, in his own language. Anyway, it isn’t a promise. Kylo growls against Hux’s throat when he comes, his hand cradled behind Hux’s head. Then Hux is lowered carefully to the table and Kylo is trembling over him, his cock still pulsing as he slides from Hux’s ass. 

“No,” Hux says when Kylo moves away from him. He feels broken, and not in the way he hoped he would. But Kylo is only getting a dish towel from the sink. He seems to intend to mop at the mess he’s made of Hux’s ass, but he moves up to dry Hux’s face, then kisses the corners of his eyes, licking up his tears. Hux pushes at him weakly, embarrassed. He doesn’t really want Kylo to go. Kylo lifts him from the table and carries him into the bedroom. 

“You’re safe,” Kylo whispers when he deposits Hux in bed, kneeling over him. 

Hux scoffs and rolls onto his side, curls in on himself. His eyes have mostly dried, but he wipes at them with the heel of his hand anyway, compulsively. 

“The table hurt you?” Kylo asks. He touches Hux’s tense shoulders. 

“No,” Hux says bitterly. “I’m not hurt.” 

He lets Kylo roll him onto his front, lets Kylo rub his shoulders and back, which are sore, though more from nights of tense half-sleep than anything they’ve done during sex. Kylo’s powerful hands were made for this, and Hux feels himself giving over to it, his muscles melting under Kylo’s attention. He can feel Kylo’s anxious regret hovering around him like a cool mist against his skin as his sweat dries there-- Regret not about fucking Hux on the kitchen table but because he showed Hux something that he wanted to keep hidden, only to stuff it back down, too late. 

That night, there is an impromptu but lavish feast in honor of Luke and Rey’s return. Rey looks sleepy but game at the place of honor, in the center of the royal table, a crown of modest spring flowers on her head. Luke keeps mostly to the corners of the room, letting Rey suffer the spotlight. Hux is exhausted, his ass stinging and tailbone sore, and Kylo seems on guard, shaking his head every time the servants bring wine. Hux sees him watching Rey, Luke, even Leia. He doesn’t understand why Kylo has styled them as enemies, and what this Master could have done to win such competing loyalty. Whatever it was, it’s something more than Hux knows how to do with his meager, non-magical powers. For every drink Kylo refuses, Hux has two. 

He doesn’t remember the walk back to the house, and he wakes up alone in bed with an aching head and a dry tongue. 

“Kylo?” he calls, hopelessly. He can feel it when Kylo is gone. The bedroom walls look different. The place doesn’t feel like a home. 

Hux gulps down as much water as he can stand to swallow and goes back to sleep, defeated. When he wakes again, morning has come, well past dawn. There’s some kind of commotion going on beyond the window-- A parade for the returned royal family members, perhaps? They were calling Rey a princess at last night’s feast. 

Kylo is still gone. Hux lingers in bed, in disbelief, and doesn’t protest when Mitaka comes running into the house after only knocking once. 

“In here,” Hux says, glad now that he didn’t undress before bed. He’s still got his tunic on when Mitaka hurries into the bedroom, his eyes wide. 

“Sir,” he says, forgetting to bow. “Please-- Where is Prince Kylo?”

“I don’t know,” Hux admits. “Why do you need him?”

“There’s-- Something terrible has happened, my lord.” 

“What?” Hux throws the blankets away, springs out of bed. His stomach lurches, too tender to be suddenly in motion. “An attack?” 

“Yes, oh-- A terrible tragedy.” Mitaka looks over his shoulder and then back at Hux. “Han Solo has been killed,” he says, whispering. “Murdered, we think.” 

“Who the hell is Han Solo?” 

“The royal father, sir.” 

“Oh-- Oh.” Hux falls back against the bed, half-sitting. “Kylo-- Where is Ren?”

“That’s what I came here hoping to find out, sir.” 

Hux dismisses Mitaka and dresses himself, in such a disbelieving daze that his hands don’t even shake. He feels as if he’s moving through a bad dream when he sneaks away from the house and into the woods, looking back over his shoulder to make sure he’s not been seen. Everyone seems to have congregated in the village square. Hux moves further and further from the noise of the village, along the trail that he took with Kylo when they hunted together. 

_Murder_ , he thinks, blinking against the dappled sunlight that cuts down through the treetops. It wasn’t uncommon at court in the East, and he certainly expected it to factor into the political landscape in the barbaric West. But something about this feels off, wrong. Why kill someone with as little influence as the royal father? Unless to hurt the more powerful? The Queen, and--

“Kylo!” Hux calls, becoming desperate. He turns in circles, reality beginning to edge in around his delirium, pricking against his skin and curdling in his gut. “Kylo, please, are you here? It’s Hux, it’s me, it’s--”

Hux’s voice breaks off. He doesn’t know what to call himself in relation to Kylo. He feels like something both less and more than a husband, but perhaps that’s exactly what he is: common and functional, a piece of middling property to be traded from one kingdom to another, not important enough to even gather dust in either place before things shift irreversibly around him. 

He stumbles along the trail, entertaining the idea of never going back to the village whether he finds Kylo here or not, though he probably wouldn’t be welcome to live in these woods even as a wretched scavenger, as they’re ruled over by a ghoul who trades in royal sons. When he reaches the stream where he once made camp with Kylo he’s afraid for a moment that he’s stumbled upon the ghoul, but it’s Kylo: bent and shivering at the edge of the water, soaked in blood. 

“No!” Hux shouts, imagining a stab wound to match the royal father’s. Perhaps Kylo’s father tried to throw himself in the path of the real attack. Kylo remains hunched over as Hux drops to his side, but he’s not concealing a wound. The blood belongs to someone else, Hux realizes, as he slides his hands through it, searching for the source and finding nothing. 

Kylo’s eyes are red-rimmed, terrified. Hux touches his face, inadvertently smearing blood there. 

“What happened?” Hux asks. “Darling? Tell me, please. Whatever it is, I’m still yours. Do you understand? I’m with you now. Never leaving. Tell me what you need from me and you’ll have it.” 

“Hux.” Kylo pinches his eyes shut tightly, shakes his head. He says something in his native language. Hux knows the words well enough: _too late_.

“No, shhh, stop that. I’m here, what do you need? Here, let’s-- We’ll clean you up first. Okay?”

Kylo lets Hux wash his hands in the steam, the blood flowing away from them in pinkish threads. Hux cleans the blood from Kylo’s chest and arms, and rubs at the few splatters on his pants until they’re gone. He carefully wipes away the smear he left on Kylo’s cheek. 

“There,” Hux whispers, holding Kylo’s face in his hands once they’re clean, too. He kisses Kylo’s nose, his shaking lips. “Now what?” Hux asks, desperate to be told. “Shall we go back to your village or deeper into the woods? Do you want to come with me to the East? You could be a betrayer like your grandfather. I don’t care. My father would love you for it. We could live off of his gratitude forever. I told you, I want to go wherever you’re going. So where are we going?” 

“My father,” Kylo says, eyes overflowing again. “He’s dead.” 

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m-- sorry?”

Kylo collapses against Hux’s chest, heaving massive sobs that sound like they must hurt. Hux holds him and shushes him, pets his hair and keeps an eye out for any approaching enemies. He’s not even sure how he’d identify them now. It feels as if Kylo has set the whole world against them. He should hate Kylo for it, but he holds him tighter, feeling more savagely protective than ever, unable to explain it even to himself. 

He wishes that his father had warned him about the danger of this kind of love, but he suspects that Brendol the Fierce does not know of its existence. Perhaps few who live for very long do. Hux feels as if this mad, limitless devotion is something he personally invented. Kylo sits up, wipes his face and takes a deep breath. Maybe Hux is only a slave to this reckless love because, when their eyes meet, he knows Kylo feels it, too. 

“Did you kill your father?” Hux asks, holding Kylo’s hands so that he’ll know he’s already forgiven. 

Kylo nods. “Snoke demanded it.” 

“Snoke. Your Master?”

“Yes.” 

“And-- Are you still in your Master’s service? Having done this? Are you glad of it?”

“No, no, no--”

“Okay, all right. I thought not. We need to get out of these woods, don’t we?”

“Yes. Hux, I’m sorry--”

“Shh, save that for later. I have a plan. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” 

“Are you mine?” Hux asks, pouring everything into the question now: _do you love me, will you help me, will we be okay?_

“Yes,” Kylo says, standing. He’s still holding Hux’s hands, pulling him up, too. 

“Good,” Hux says. He turns to survey the woods. Still in the first bloom of spring, they glitter with fresh green and pockets of wildflowers that grow over the unmarked graves of those who fell in battle here. Hux’s people, or as near to it as he’s known. Though really, only Kylo has ever been his person. “Let’s go,” Hux says, leaning up to give Kylo a chaste kiss. 

He walks, and Kylo follows.

 

 

**


	3. Chapter 3

Every year the first snow that falls in the Eastern Kingdom makes Kylo sad, then angry, then resigned, even as his power swells in his chest like an unexpelled breath, wanting to be channeled into some sort of action. When there is no action to take, he goes on waiting and spends another winter here behind his mask, silent at the Emperor’s side, with Snoke’s company always festering within him. This winter will be different from all previous, but not in any ways that are good.

He goes looking for Hux, his hands in fists and his determination not to be brushed aside growing as he strides through the halls of the Imperial palace. The high ceilings and grandly appointed hallways have never felt like home to him. He preferred where they lived when they first arrived here as refugees from the west, but for Hux it wasn’t enough. Nothing is enough for Hux anymore, if it ever was.

Hux is alone as usual, in his receiving chamber but receiving no one. No lower ranking guard dares to object to Kylo’s entrance, and Kylo doesn’t deign to slow his stride as he approaches the Emperor. The chamber’s doors shut with a slam that echoes behind him like the threat from a war drum. 

Hux looks up from the final plans for the weapon only briefly and without any apparent surprise. There is only one person in the entire kingdom who would dare to enter unannounced. Even his late mother had meekly requested his attention by the end of her illness. Hux has been different since her death; he was different already, as soon as they set foot here, with Han’s blood still under Kylo’s fingernails in two places, but losing his beloved mother took the last of something warm from Hux, and Kylo has no surplus of warmth to offer in this unforgiving land, within these soaring marble rooms. He tried, especially after the funeral, but it’s been so long since he lit a fire in himself that Hux wanted to be warmed by, and he’s forgotten how. 

“What do you want,” Hux asks when Kylo stands before him, still wearing his mask. Sometimes Kylo approaches even his own bed without removing the helmet, so accustomed is he to thinking of it as his true face here, in this land where most people wear masks of one kind or another. Hux’s countenance is unimpressed but otherwise blank when he looks up from his papers a second time. Kylo turns to the enormous windows that line the western wall of the receiving chamber, preferring to watch the snowfall as it intensifies outside. 

“It’s snowing,” Kylo says. 

“Yes, and?”

“We hoped that it wouldn’t, before the use of the weapon.” 

“It’s no matter. Not even a blizzard would dampen the weapon’s impact much, if your promises about being able to control it prove true.” 

“You doubt me.” 

Hux doesn’t refute that. He frowns down at the plans, which he drew up and which Kylo augmented. They refer to the operation they will soon enact as the ‘use of the weapon’ when they might call it the destruction of the last stubborn remnants of Kylo’s people, who hide in the woods that abut the neutral zone. Kylo knows his mother is among them, and Rey, Luke. Snoke informs Kylo of their location and activities from time to time; he sees all that goes on in the woods. Even twelve years later, Hux doesn’t know the bargain Kylo struck with his master the night they fled together to Hux’s homeland. Kylo has thought of telling him many times, when the strain of it has etched its wounds ever deeper into what remains of their own connection, but doing so would mean confessing what Kylo gave up in exchange for Hux’s life: part of his mind, a door that Snoke can open and enter through as he likes. Hux might fear Kylo if he found out, and Kylo cannot bear to watch another person he loves grow to fear him. He would rather watch Hux grow cold to him entirely.

“It’s not doubt so much as caution,” Hux says, his voice clipped. His eyes are weary; he is only thirty-four years old but has already developed the posture of an older man, stooped with burdens. “Don’t be concerned about the snow. Whatever else might go wrong, I trust it’s no match for what we will unleash.”  

“You’re tense,” Kylo observes. 

Hux glares at him. “Are you surprised? We’ve worked these past twelve years for the moment that will arrive tomorrow. My success as Emperor hinges upon it. Do you expect me to be reclining in a bath and sipping honey wine?” 

“I wonder what you think success means anymore.” 

“You would really claim not to know, at this hour?” 

Hux’s expression softens after he’s barked this. He puts down his quill and pinches the bridge of his nose, wincing. 

“I have a headache,” he confesses, muttering this so softly that Kylo hears something of his old self in it, the Hux he had in his bed for only a few seasons after they were first married. He steps closer to the throne without meaning to. 

“I know you haven’t been sleeping.” Kylo dislikes the sound of his own voice through the mask, at moments like this. He still speaks his native language when he’s alone with Hux, and it feels like something that belongs only to the two of them now. “I hear you pacing at night,” he adds, more softly, when Hux looks up at him. 

“You could--” Hux breaks off there and shakes his head. 

Kylo knows him well enough to guess what he almost said. _You could pass through the door that separates our rooms. You could comfort me when I’m so wracked with worry and regret that I can’t stand still. You could give me something to do very late at night, besides pacing_. 

“Let me--” Kylo says, and he reaches for the catches on the sides of his helmet, uncoupling it from the mask that has covers his face during every public appearance in this place. He shakes his hair out when he’s removed it, blinking in the too-bright light through the windows. The snow is coming down in a thick veil of white now, blocking the view of the distant mountains. Kylo is glad for this. He doesn’t want to think about the mountains just now, and particularly not the one that he will transform into a weapon tomorrow. 

“Let you what?” Hux asks. His voice is small, tired. He’s looking at the helmet as Kylo sets it on the floor, probably itching to tell him to put it back on. No one in the Eastern kingdom knows that Prince Kylo lives. Hux came home to the east ragged and thin after their harrowing trek through the neutral zone, telling the story that he murdered his husband when the barbarian revealed his family’s plans to attack the Eastern people. A man who cherished his foreign spouse could never attain power in the East, Hux claimed, but one who had bested a warrior Prince might. Brendol the Fierce and his successor, Hux’s older brother, were the only ones here who once knew the truth. Now they have both been been conveniently killed, not by Hux’s hand but by his scheming. He has been Emperor in the East for five years: Armitage the Resourceful, a title he despises. If their use of the weapon goes as planned he hopes to ascend to Armitage the Triumphant or perhaps Armitage the Vengeful, Emperor of the Known World. Whatever the elders choose, his new title would reflect brutal glory and not pitiful redemption. It is Hux’s dearest dream to be renamed as ruler. As far as Kylo can tell, it’s only thing Hux wants now, though he suspects Hux will go on to want some other, grander glory if he gets it.   

“Let me help ease your pain,” Kylo says, walking closer. “Your worry is not useful. I know how to make your mind lighter.” 

“Do you.” Hux sounds skeptical, but his eyes have brightened with interest and he’s shifting upon the throne. 

Once he’s in reach of Hux’s legs, Kylo lowers slowly to his knees, keeping his gaze locked on Hux’s. It has been seventeen days since they last touched. Kylo keeps a running log always in his mind: last time it was very late at night, and Hux was the one who crossed the threshold into Kylo’s room, woke him with a nudge and sat between his legs on the bed. He got Kylo hard, rode him with abandon, and his cracked little cries of relief had been such that Kylo had thought at several points that Hux might fall to weeping on his cock. Kylo had wanted him to, almost, because then he might have had reason enough to draw Hux close and hold him, but Hux did not cry. He hoarsely said _thank you_ in Kylo’s language when they were done and climbed off, stumbled away.  

All that has gone wrong between them is Kylo’s fault, sprouting sickly from the rotten seed of his worst mistake, the one that forced them to flee here. Kylo knows this, always has it firmly in mind, and this is why he now parts Hux’s knees gently and leans forward to kiss the thickening bulge of his cock through his pants. _Sorry_ , Kylo is saying, even on those occasions when he bends Hux over and fucks into him hard enough to leave him limping in the aftermath, always at Hux’s request. _Sorry, sorry we’re like this_ , and _Let me help you still, please_.

“We shouldn’t,” Hux says, his breath already short and his hands are clawed around both arms of his throne. He’s watching Kylo as if he’s a beautiful but wild animal who might snap out of his housebroken trance at any moment. Kylo can’t fault him for that. “Not here,” Hux says, so softly that Kylo knows they will do it here, in fact. Hux’s legs are spreading, and his cock has grown fully hard under Kylo’s continued soft kisses and nuzzling. 

“Let me worship you,” Kylo says, with only a small bite of meanness. “Emperor.” 

Hux huffs, his shoulders relaxing against the back of the throne. He’s so lovely when he lets his posture ease and his gaze soften. He’s lovely when he’s rageful and sharp, too, but differently now, in a way that Kylo can no longer enjoy. When they first met, on the day of their wedding, he’d wanted Hux so much for that pitiless stare, for the icy challenge of it and the way it melted from him as his clothes were peeled away, under the heat of Kylo’s hands.

“Enough teasing,” Hux says, glancing at the doors of the receiving chamber. “Go on, if you’re determined.” 

As if Hux is doing Kylo the favor of letting him suck his cock, and Kylo supposes he is. He gives Hux a dark look anyway, a warning or a threat that’s empty of meaning, then reaches for the buckle on Hux’s heavy belt. Hux holds his breath as he watches Kylo open his belt and then his pants, exhales when Kylo tugs his underthings out of the way. He makes a choked-off noise when Kylo’s gloved hand wraps around his shaft, the soft leather gliding over the heat of him. Their eyes lock as Kylo leans in to kiss too softly at the leaking head, licking up a drop of precome with just the point of his tongue. Hux presses his lips together and shifts his hips up. Begging. 

“You’re so in need,” Kylo says, low and close to menacing as he watches Hux squirm, wanting Kylo so much that he certainly hates him a little for it. “When did you last spill even into your own hand?”

“I don’t-- I don’t keep a log,” Hux says, knees twitching around Kylo’s sides. “I suppose you do it every night, still. Like a boy.” 

“Mhm, yes. I lie in bed listening to your anxious pacing and I abuse myself to the rhythm of your footsteps.” 

Hux sniffs; it’s almost a laugh. Kylo gives him a long, fat lick from base to tip in reward. 

“Oh,” Hux says, pressing his hips up again. “Yes, I-- Please, that is. So good, thank you--” 

Kylo considers the opportunity to taunt Hux for falling apart for him so easily, then suppresses the urge and mouths wetly at his shaft instead, earning a soft moan that makes his own cock stiffen in his pants. They’ve done this on the throne before, though not for years. It had more novelty when Brendol the Younger was newly dead and the throne was just recently theirs. That was what Hux had called it, five years ago: _their_ throne, secretly. Even after the death of the last person in this kingdom who knew them to be married. 

“Your mouth,” Hux says, flexing up against it. 

“You like my mouth?” 

Kylo wants to add, then why do you no longer kiss me there, but he knows why. 

“I like-- Yes, very much. I hate that-- I never see your face. In my dreams that thing is your face.”

He’s looking at the helmet. Kylo takes him fully into his mouth to regain his attention. Hux groans and pushes both his hands into Kylo’s hair, his short fingernails sliding over Kylo’s scalp, possessive and insistent. The feeling of being possessed by Hux, needed by him, makes Kylo shudder with pleasure in a way that is probably very evident, his cock straining into full hardness now. _Your hands_ , he would say, if his mouth wasn’t stuffed with Hux’s cock. _I hate that they are never on me now_. 

“What if I undressed you entirely,” Kylo says instead when he pulls free, his lips moving against the swollen head of Hux’s cock as his hands go to the waist of Hux’s pants. “And pushed your legs back and put my mouth where you like it best.” 

Hux moans under his breath and for a moment looks like he’s actually considering it, his eyes hazy and his chest heaving. 

“Just get on with what you’re already doing,” he says, jaw tightening. His brow pinches as if he wants to object to his own words, but still he speaks them. “It’s mad enough that we’re doing this at all, with everything, ah. Hanging in the balance.” 

Everything, Kylo wants to say, and he matches Hux’s hard stare. What’s everything. They’ve lost their families-- Kylo as good as, truly and finally if he goes through with things tomorrow. They’ve lost the woods, which will be destroyed by the weapon, and they long ago lost the freedom to walk there together and hunt and warm each other inside tents. They’ve lost their trust in each other, their ability to share a bed, all the promises they made before they destroyed everything in order to save each other. So what _everything_ exactly is there left to save?

“Fine,” Hux says, shoving Kylo away when he’s hesitated too long. “If this was only-- If you’re just trying to drive me to distraction and leave me-- I can do it myself.” 

“You can suck your own cock?” Kylo says, his chest flaring with rage. He wants to break something, but only sits back on his knees. “I’m impressed, let’s see.” 

“Fuck you,” Hux says, in his own language. “Leave me in peace, menace.” 

Hux’s voice wavered on that last word. Kylo grabs Hux’s legs, tugging them forward so that Hux tips against him unsteadily, gasping. There’s a moment when their foreheads nearly knock together and Kylo thinks of kissing him, but now is not the time. He breathes hard against Hux’s face, his cock pulsing for the look of stunned curiosity in Hux’s eyes, so long unseen. 

“You’re right,” Kylo says, gritting the words out. “Save it. Tuck your aching dick away and leave it untouched until I come for you tonight. It’s only fitting that we fuck on the eve of using the weapon. I will have you and have you, again and again, and when you’re overflowing with my use of you perhaps you will finally be able to sleep.”  

He waits for Hux to exhale in a reedy, narrow push, then stands and turns, grabbing his helmet from the floor. The sound of Hux doing up his pants is all he gets, no shouted parting words nor the barest hint that Hux might actually allow Kylo into his bedroom after nightfall. 

But Kylo knows him, even now, and doesn’t look back after putting the helmet on, only barrels through the receiving chamber’s doors and lets them slam shut behind him, his stiff cock troubling his gait as he hurries away. He knows Hux, and Hux won’t want to be alone tonight. Hux also won’t admit that he’d just as soon be held and whispered to in the dark as fucked hard enough to bar any sort of conversation about what they’re about to do or what came before. So Hux will allow Kylo into his room and will bend over upon his stately bed to show Kylo the almighty Emperor’s sweet little hole, seventeen days untouched and snug as the first night Kylo had him. Hux will let Kylo lick and then fuck into him, and if he’s particularly frightened and very tired perhaps he will also let Kylo kiss him once or twice before the dawn comes and they break open the gates of hell together. 

 

**

Kylo spends the remainder of his day peering at the volcano in the distance from various vantage points throughout the palace. They will leave in the morning and reach the edge of its bubbling crater just before the sun sets. The eruption has been a long time coming and would happen with or without the involvement of Kylo and Snoke’s powers, but with both in hand Kylo should be able to direct the flow of lava into the rebel encampment in the woods, far enough to reach those who thought they would be clear of the destruction. This shall be a final, dramatic blow to any who dare to oppose Armitage the Resourceful, soon to be the Resplendent et cetera. Snoke tells Kylo that it’s poetic, as Kylo’s grandfather was badly burned in his attempt to weaponize this same volcano the last time it erupted, many years ago. He did not have Snoke’s help.  

 _And you do, my son_ , Snoke says, stepping through the door in Kylo’s mind. 

Kylo startles, turning from the stone railing of the balcony he’s lingering upon. He can normally feel a low, churning stir before Snoke’s voice appears in his head. It’s usually enough warning to at least flee Hux’s presence before he can feel Kylo go cold and watch his eyes shift into hateful blankness. Kylo is distracted today, besieged by what he’s about to deny. 

_Master_ , he answers, feeling the blood drain from his face as it always does. _I do not doubt that our shared victory is in reach_. 

He learned quickly that while Snoke can speak to him through the door in his mind and steal him away from the present moment, he can’t read Kylo’s thoughts. Not those that Kylo keeps for himself, anyway. 

_You have ascended along the path that I foresaw for you in this mortal realm_ , comes Snoke’s response, curling like thick smoke inside Kylo’s skull and making him feel like he might choke if he breathes too deeply. _Soon all of our long plans will come to bear, beloved son_. 

Kylo has never liked Snoke calling him his son, and he’s liked it less since he killed Han according to Snoke’s command. But he cannot deny that his powers are strengthened through his alliance with the ageless creature who found him crying in the woods after Rey arrived in the village and stole everyone’s hearts and admiration from him, the magic Prince who should have had them always. Now his original motivations for joining with Snoke seem childish and much too small, but there is no going back and there never has been. Snoke would have killed Hux in the woods as they fled the west, but because Kylo begged him not to and offered this access to his mind instead, Hux was spared. Snoke is merciful to those who are loyal. 

_No magic users will be spared from the burning death that comes for them_ , Snoke says, a reminder that drops into Kylo’s gut like boiling acid. _Once the vile ones who rejected you are gone from this world, only you and I shall wield these powers. In this new world there will be no one strong enough to harm you_.

Or Hux, Kylo thinks, not sure if he’s said so in answer to Snoke or only to himself. 

_Soon your glory will burn across the lands_ , Snoke says. _Meditate on what must be done. Tomorrow I will be with you at the hour of your ultimate need of me. Tomorrow all shall know our true power together at last_.

Then Snoke is gone from him and Kylo is left breathing heavily as if released from a grip on his throat. He puts his hand there and feels the pound of his pulse under his thumb, and even through his glove there is the startling coolness of his exposed skin below the shadow of the mask. He wonders if what Snoke said is true, if all will know of their secret, sustained alliance by nightfall tomorrow, as ash rains around the victorious party that stands on the volcano’s rim, watching the lava flow only as Kylo and Snoke command. Will Hux know, then? And what will be left for Kylo if he does? 

Evening brings him no appetite aside from his gnawing and ever-present hunger for Hux, and he eats no food before retiring to his bedchamber. It is adjacent to Hux’s, in the official telling, because Kylo is Hux’s nameless and faceless head guard, peerlessly loyal and strong, a demonic protector worthy of an Emperor. There are various stories about where he came from, some spread by Hux himself but most originating from whispered rumors based on nothing more than people’s fear and awe of Kylo. His personal favorite is that Hux made him from rock and steel and had his magic husband from the west bring this fearsome pile of strength to life, then ordered the demon warrior to kill the barbarian wizard who’d given him breath, thereby outsmarting the west once and for all. It seems true enough, to Kylo, at times. In his own mind’s eye he is now more armor than man, and he once would have thought he’d be glad for it, but sometimes he is also naked and defenseless in Hux’s bed, and that is the self he secretly craves most to be, even though Hux wounds him mercilessly there. 

Kylo washes and dresses in a garment not unlike what he once wore in his home village: a tight pair of pants made of a fine material, no shirt or shoes. He listens for the sound of Hux’s arrival in the neighboring room, his heart pounding the way it did on the journey to his marriage in the neutral zone. His mother had promised him that his husband to be was fine-looking, but she had often lied. It was to Kylo’s great relief when they rode up and he saw that in this case she had been true to her word: Hux, scowling in his heavy marriage clothes, flame-haired and pale with badly concealed fright, proud in the set of his shoulders and with eyes like the softest green things that grew from the loamy forest floor in early spring. Kylo had to use his powers to keep from getting an erection as soon as he settled behind Hux on the horse that bore them home, and when Hux’s sweet head tipped forward as he nearly sank into sleep upon the horse, Kylo fell in love with him in a way that has proved unbreakable, even through all these years of splintered separation. He asked Snoke what was to be done the next time he was summoned to the woods, after Hux had opened his body to Kylo and buried Kylo’s heart forever within him in the process. 

“I want him,” Kylo had said, taking up a tone that strayed closer to disrespect than anything he’d ever dared with Snoke, who remained curled in on himself in his cave, motionless. “To keep,” Kylo clarified when Snoke gave him only the usual unwavering stare. 

“You may have him,” Snoke said, and something about the statement gave Kylo a chill rather than a comfort. “But he may not have you. Do you understand?”

Kylo understood, but he lied when he claimed to accept this. In Snoke’s view, Kylo belongs solely to him. If Snoke could look into Kylo’s mind and heart he would hiss and bare his rotten teeth at the betrayal Kylo holds there, his far greater love for Hux. But Snoke cannot do that, for all his power. It is the one thing Kylo holds out of Snoke’s reach, even as he gives more and more of himself up in exchange. 

Finally he can’t wait any longer. He goes to the door that separates his room from Hux’s and touches the gleaming, polished handle. He can feel Hux on the other side of the wall and knows that he’ll have been listening so intently for Kylo’s approach that the sound of his grip on the door’s handle will have made his breath catch.

 _I love you_ , Kylo thinks, imagining Hux might hear this, as if there is a door in Hux’s mind and Kylo can come through it. _I have loved you from the moment I held the warm weight of you against me and carried you home to where I should have allowed us to remain_. He long ago accepted that killing Han was a mistake; he knew it the moment his blade pierced his father’s chest. Snoke had promised an influx of new power through the act, and with Rey’s ominous return Kylo had known he would need it, but he’d never felt more powerless than he did when he realized too late that Snoke was punishing him through this command, not strengthening him. 

But even in the forever-crumbled aftermath he still had what Snoke had hoped to take from him: Hux, who did not so much as scold Kylo when he saw the blood on his hands. Hux’s anger came later, gradually, and it has brought them to this teetering moment where a wall stands between them, but still Hux is on the other side, waiting for him. Snoke never would have let Hux leave the woods alive if Kylo hadn’t lied to him, telling him that he could abandon Snoke just as easily as he abandoned his people that day. _Best after all if he doesn’t know your true devotion to me_ , Snoke had said. Ironically, Kylo realizes. 

He opens the door. Hux is sitting on his bed, dressed in his nightclothes. All the lamps are lit. Hux fidgets as if he’s going to rise and then remains in place. 

“Do you still have need of me?” Kylo asks. It’s less like a question and more like a plea for mercy that unsteadies his voice. 

“Kylo,” Hux says in answer, making no attempt to conceal that he’s weak with want, suffering. “Yes-- Please. I do.”

Kylo matches Hux’s exhale and remains near the door. He feels suddenly moved to confess, to tell Hux that his weapon will be powered largely by Snoke, whom Hux has always hated on instinct, and that Kylo only ever lied to spare Hux’s life, because Hux never would have left the woods if he knew that they did so only on Snoke’s allowance and at the price of Kylo’s sovereign mind. Hux might have urged Kylo to go back to his own people, to try to conceal the crime, but Luke would have known, and Rey-- 

“I’ve no need of those pants you’re wearing,” Hux says. “Take them off and approach me.” 

He sounds irritated again by Kylo’s descent into his own troubled thoughts, which looks to Hux like distracted hesitation. He’s sensitive to this, after all these years of seeing Kylo withdraw from him at Snoke’s command and not knowing why. At least when Kylo left their bed for the woods at night, Hux knew he was going somewhere. Now he only sees Kylo’s departures as rejection.

Kylo undresses in silence. He’s thought all day about how this evening would go, when he wasn’t worrying about how the weapon might malfunction or what will happen if it doesn’t. He steps out of his pants and shows Hux his fully naked self for the first time in two months, five days. Hux stares and stares, and if this were a different sort of night Kylo might taunt him for having so many lamps lit for the occasion. 

“Let me see you, too,” Kylo says, walking toward the bed as his cock starts to fill. 

Hux tugs his nightshirt off and drops it onto the floor. He reaches for the drawstring of his sleep pants, but Kylo gets there first. They both watch his fingers work, untying this boundary between them as Hux’s cock stiffens inside the soft, thin wool. Kylo can hear Hux’s breath, can smell his soap-scrubbed skin. He wants to bury his face in Hux’s hair and weep like he hasn’t since that day in the woods when Hux cleaned the blood off of him and swore to protect him. Hux thought Kylo could be protected here, in his homeland-- from Snoke, from the presence of Kylo’s family still alive out there, from what he had done to Han. Hux’s belief that running to the Eastern kingdom would fix everything had lifted Kylo’s heart just enough to keep it from crumbling under the weight of knowing that Hux couldn’t really save him from any of that, wherever they went. 

“Well, here I am,” Hux says, scooting back onto the bed once he’s naked. His legs are spread awkwardly, and he’s blushing as if they’re newly married, which happens sometimes but rarely. “You promised to fuck me so well that I’ll have no choice but to sleep,” Hux says, delicate lashes flicking over his eyes when he tries to hold Kylo’s gaze. “You had better do it. Please, Kylo. I need--” 

“I know.” Kylo crawls onto the bed, then onto Hux, who sinks down beneath him like he’s ready to receive oceans of Kylo’s come if it means he can truly rest afterward. Kylo sometimes fears that neither of them will ever sleep well again. They both suffer from nightmares. 

“This place has changed me so much,” Hux confesses in a whisper when Kylo’s face hovers just over his. “But not you,” he says, stroking Kylo’s hair back. 

“You’re wrong,” Kylo says, surprised at his frankness and by this assessment. “I have changed.” 

“Not in my eyes. Not when you’re in my bed and I want you so much that I don’t know myself.” 

“Mhm.” Kylo reaches for the oil Hux set out. It moves through the air, coming from the table by the bed and snapping into Kylo’s hand, another reminder of his power and what it has cost him. Not every magic user can do this. Rey could do it even as a child. Kylo couldn’t manage it without Snoke’s help, before his intervention. “Let me remind you who you are,” Kylo says, uncapping the oil and dipping two fingers into the jar. “Who you really are.” 

“And who is that?” Hux seems to be truly asking, or maybe the pleading look on his face has more to do with Kylo’s slick fingers circling his rim. 

_Mine_ , Kylo thinks but does not say. They have not dared to ask each other _are you mine_ in many years, both too afraid of the answer. There was a time when it wasn’t even a question but a confident statement.

“You’re the boy who cursed me when I did this once,” Kylo says, sliding his finger in now just as he knows Hux likes it: smoothly but not slowly, grazing the spot that reliably makes him gasp. 

Hux curses, maybe at himself this time: for gasping, for having been predictable in doing so, or for clenching around Kylo as if to say _more, more, deeper, please_. His eyes are foggy already, lips parted. 

“You were so coarse,” Hux says, lashes fluttering when Kylo drags his finger out. “Have I refined you?”

“Ask me again when my balls are slapping against your ass.”

Hux groans and throws his head back, his heels stuttering against the bedsheets as he seems to fight the urge to rut down onto Kylo’s single pumping finger.  

“You’re right,” Hux says. He allows his hips to twitch, just slightly. “I haven’t-- You’re still my barbarian.”

 _My_ barbarian, Kylo thinks, and he crooks his finger, swooping down to lick at Hux’s left nipple when he shouts. 

“More,” Hux demands. He lifts his head, his eyes glinting as he shows Kylo his true, greedy, shameless self, the one who intimidated Kylo to near tears the first time they went to bed together. “Come on, just-- I don’t need to be handled so carefully.” 

“I’ll handle you however I like. Who said this is for your benefit?”

That makes Hux smile, and Kylo’s half-hard cock fills rapidly in response, the rush of blood to his loins almost enough to make him lightheaded. He remembers that he hasn’t eaten. 

“You like that, do you?” Hux asks, running his fingers through Kylo’s hair. “Pushing inside me with your big hands, feeling my secret places?” 

“I like watching you squirm on my fingers while you grow desperate, yes.” 

“Mhm. You like seeing me weak.” Hux’s eyes change, the light that had leapt into them sinking back into some secret place where he hoards it. “Like I would have been if we’d stayed in your lands, the little whore you carried home on horseback to warm your bed.” 

“I never thought of you as a whore.” 

“Well, that’s kind of you, but wasn’t I? Sold off by my father, the less important son with the funny hair, a novelty for the barbarian Prince to fuck. It was my duty to keep you busy in that way, you know.” 

“Why are you saying this?” Kylo withdraws his finger and sits back. Hux’s chest is rising and falling too quickly; his jaw is too hard-set. “What have I done wrong now?”

“Nothing.” Hux remains on his back: cock stiff, nipples hard, his little hole clenching around nothing as he leaves his legs spread so Kylo can see its worked-on blush. “Don’t stop. Ignore me. Maybe I wanted to be your whore.” 

Those three statements do not fit together into a suggested course of action. “You were my husband,” Kylo says. “You are, still. At least in my eyes.” 

“I hated telling them I’d killed you,” Hux says. His voice is hushed now, embarrassed. “They were so pleased. As if it was the first useful thing I’d ever done. And then my father’s disappointment when I had to confess in private that I’d really kept you and brought you with me. My father and my brother were always plotting to get rid of you, did you know that? Did you realize? How I protected you? I had them killed for you, to keep you safe here. Not because I wanted to be Emperor. I didn’t. I don’t.” 

“Are you drunk?” Kylo asks, as kindly as he can. He moves over Hux again and arranges himself like a kind of shield, bending down to catch the scent of Hux’s breath. 

“I wish,” Hux says. He pulls Kylo onto him and brings their faces together, his eyelashes tickling Kylo’s temple. “Never mind, forget it. I want you inside me. I feel as though the world’s ending tomorrow.” 

“We don’t have to use the weapon,” Kylo says, surprising himself. 

Hux rears backward. “What? Yes, we do. It’s a show of might. A demonstration. Are you having second thoughts about your family? I thought you wanted Rey and the others dead more than anything.” 

“Never mind,” Kylo says, his voice very flat. He reaches for the oil again, then just holds it. Hux is studying him, waiting. Kylo often finds himself thinking that Hux looks so young like this: without all this Imperial robes and only crowned by his disordered hair, very pale in some places and flushed in others. “I love you,” Kylo says, in Hux’s language, before switching back to his own: “Do you know it?”

“Yes,” Hux says, very softly. “And I. Do you--”

“Yes.” Kylo knows that Hux resents him for forcing them to come here, for being inexplicably distant at random intervals ever since they arrived, and now he knows that resentment extends into Hux’s ascension to Emperor. He also knows Hux loves him. Hux would not be suffering like this if he did not. Kylo strokes the softest skin on the inside of Hux’s thighs, watches him flex into the touch. 

“Would you do something for me?” Hux asks. 

“Anything.” 

“Ah-- ha.” Hux worries his teeth over his bottom lip, arches slightly. “Treat me like your prize,” he says. “Like we’re in a land that belongs to you and I’m yours and-- only yours, just that.” 

“Like--” Kylo narrows his eyes, not sure what that means. 

Only yours, just that. _Are you mine?_

“Please,” Hux says, in a way that explains everything. It’s in his voice, his eyes, the way his shoulders curl inward. He’s tired of having to ask for everything he wants, even though he always gets it. Especially because he does. 

“Come here,” Kylo says, sitting back on his heels. He takes hold of his cock and pumps himself to full hardness again. “Are you-- My prize?” 

“Yes,” Hux says, sitting up. An eager blush renews itself across his cheeks; he licks his lips. “How would you have me, my lord?”

Kylo answers by walking forward on his knees, still stroking himself. He cups Hux’s cheek and guides his head down, bumping his cockhead against Hux’s wet lips, warm breath. 

“Taste it,” Kylo says. “Just a lick.”

Hux is already breathing harder. He darts his tongue out and runs the tip through the leaking slit of Kylo’s cock, his eyes falling shut as he laps precome into his mouth, opening again when he swallows. He stares up at Kylo, face burning, trembling with gratitude and silently begging for more. If Kylo had known, all this time; since they arrived here he’s always waited for Hux to ask him for things, to tell him just how he wants them, to give all direction. 

“Again,” Kylo says, taking a handful of Hux’s hair this time. 

Hux moans. His eyelids grow heavy, pupils fat, and he leans in to lick across Kylo’s cockhead, flattening his tongue more widely now. Hungrily. Kylo can’t remember the last time Hux sucked him. He can recall the first time very well: in the woods during their first hunt together, Hux on his knees. He feels massively stupid for having forgotten how much Hux likes being the worshiper in bed when his mood is like this: serious, unsure of his footing, confessional. 

“Keep your tongue in your mouth,” Kylo says. 

Hux looks confused but obeys, pressing his lips together. Kylo rubs his cock against Hux’s hot cheeks, first the shaft and then the tip, trailing precome and drawing a soft noise of surprise from the back of Hux’s throat. Kylo leans in to lick the gleaming residue his cock left at the corner of Hux’s lips when he can no longer restrain himself. He lingers there and Hux opens his mouth just slightly, wanting a kiss. 

“Do you like that?” Kylo asks, whispering this against Hux’s parted lips. “My cock on your blushing cheeks? Having it rubbed in your face?”

“Yes,” Hux breathes out, his teeth grazing Kylo’s upper lip. “Ah, Kylo--” 

“Shh.” Kylo kisses Hux, too briefly; they both shudder when their tongues touch. It’s been so long. “Use your mouth on me again,” Kylo says. “Kiss me there. Show me what you can do.” 

Hux pulls his lips away from Kylo’s with seeming reluctance, and Kylo wonders if he’ll call off the game and start issuing orders again. But when Hux returns his gaze to Kylo’s cock he seems to remember that he’s more than content to kiss Kylo here, too, and he closes his eyes as he suckles at the head, savoring it and lapping up more precome as it trickles out, coaxed by the soft, wet heat of his mouth. Kylo breathes heavily through his nose at the sight. He won’t last long, unless he can come up with some interlude that doesn’t involve stimulation of his cock. For now, he watches as Hux kisses up and down the shaft, open-mouthed and wanton, and the grunt that wrenches out of Kylo feels like a warning he’s giving himself as Hux begins to take him into his mouth in a slow slide downward, his reddened lips opening wider around Kylo’s length, sweet green eyes pointed up at Kylo’s face as if to ask if this is allowed. 

“There you are,” Kylo says, petting Hux’s hollowed cheeks with his thumbs. “My patient little bedmate. Do you touch yourself in this room and wish that I would come through and have you? So lonely in your own bed, with nothing but your skinny fingers for comfort.” 

Hux closes his eyes and huffs around Kylo’s cock, maybe laughing a little. His tongue works the underside in messy, unpracticed swirls. He’s drooling by the time he begins to bob his head, seeming transfixed by the motion, or soothed. When Kylo presses Hux backward his chin is wet and his mouth remains open, now only around his panted breath. 

“Lie back,” Kylo says, nodding to the mattress. “Show me where you’ll receive me next.” 

Hux does so in silence, his eyes hazy and accepting, cock very hard. He seems to be relishing the chance not to speak, after all that earlier babbling. When Kylo gives Hux a stern appraisal he reaches down and takes his legs in both hands, gripping the back of each knee as he spreads himself. His hole is still faintly pink, still glistening with the oil Kylo worked into it. The first time Hux bent over and showed it to Kylo, on their wedding night, Kylo moved like a man possessed and put his mouth there without thinking. It had felt like the most natural response to seeing that tiny, vulnerable place where Hux wanted him, and indeed Hux has always loved that act as if Kylo invented it for him. 

“Spread yourself wider,” Kylo says, plotting. “Use your fingers, pull your cheeks apart. Until your hole opens just a bit.” 

Hux gets red all over and hurries to obey, moaning as he grips both of his skinny ass cheeks and opens them as much as he can. He’s begun to shake with the effort of offering himself this fully, his breath shuddering from him. 

“Good,” Kylo says, and instead of the warm tongue Hux was likely expecting he gives Hux a slap with his hand, right against his exposed hole. 

“ _Unh_ \--” Hux quakes with surprise and with pleasure, his cock twitching. 

“You punish your poor little hole by denying it my attentions,” Kylo says, feeling now like he’s the one who is drunk. “Do you like this better? Me doing the punishing?”

“Yes-- again.” Hux licks excess moisture from the corner of his lips. “Please. Harder, just-- Just a bit harder.” 

“Mhm, I don’t think so.” Kylo spanks his hole again but just lightly, then again, again, not nearly enough for it to sting the way Hux wants it to. 

Hux whines and bucks, fingers digging into the flesh of his spread cheeks as precome dribbles onto his belly. Kylo swipes his fingers through the small puddle and tastes a tiny bit of it before bringing the slick down to rub around Hux’s wanting hole, pushing in just enough to tease him. 

“Kylo,” Hux cries. His fingernails bite into his skin as he tries to pull himself open even wider, the flush on his chest spreading all the way down toward his nipples. 

“You have the insolence to beg me?” Kylo asks. “When you’re meant to be my prize?” 

He removes his teasing finger and gives Hux’s slicked, twitching hole another slap, this time just firmly enough to leave behind a sting. 

“Yes,” Hux says, his voice deep, gaze darkening. “Do it-- Do it with your cock.” 

Now of course Hux is giving orders; the reverse never lasted long even when they were young, had always served mostly to fan the flames of Hux’s arousal until he was falling apart with need and back to asking for exactly what he wants. It takes Kylo a moment to work out what Hux is suggesting, his own head fuzzy and his cock beginning to ache with the need to feel Hux’s tight heat all around him. When he gets the idea he moans low in his chest and realizes it will be worth the wait. 

He kneels between Hux’s legs, pulls his heavy cock back and releases it so that the sticky head smacks down against Hux’s hole in a teasing blow. Hux goes wild for the sensation, throwing his head back and moaning as he rocks his hips down to ask for more. Kylo does it again, again, and watches Hux’s hole redden from the attention as his moans turn to whimpers. 

“How does that feel?” Kylo asks. 

“Infuriating,” Hux says, his head lolling on the sheets. “In the best way.” 

“Describe it.”

“It’s-- Like an itch that you’re only, ah. Flicking at, rather than scratching. Making it, muh-- More intense. Fuck, Kylo, I need you.” 

“Need me how?”

“Inside me, please, I can’t wait any longer. In fact I command it. I’m your Emperor again, and you’re my nameless Knight. Plunder me, take the payment for your services from my body.” 

Kylo is dumping oil onto his cock already, unable to wait any longer himself. Hux’s language suggests that he likes the idea of not being just a prize but a whore, and an Emperor at the same time. It’s a dizzying suggestion that goes straight to Kylo’s already pulled-tight balls. Hux is his own strange phenomenon, uniquely discomfiting and contradictory and in that sense seeming always as if he was made for Kylo and vice versa. Hux resents his power here even as he hungers for more. He wants to throw it all away and yet protects it fiercely, ruining himself for it. Kylo knows both impulses and the hell it is to live with them always in tandem. He plunges into Hux while their eyes remain locked, feeling as if Hux is reading all of this from his thoughts or from the pounding of his heartbeat, which surely Hux can feel throbbing at the end of Kylo’s dick as it sinks so deeply into him. 

“Oh, yes--” Hux takes a handful of Kylo’s hair and tugs, wrenching his head back even as his legs wind around Kylo to keep him close. “Oh, that’s-- That’s good, that’s just, ah, just fucking-- hold me open, all night--”

“You only want to be held open?” Kylo is glad that Hux isn’t begging him to move yet. He needs a moment to let the intense grip of Hux’s body wash over him, lest he lose control and finish too soon. “You don’t want me to pound in and out of this lonely hole? I know how you like it when I loosen you until my seed flows from you and soaks your legs. How you like me to clean you with my mouth while you’re still gaping. None of that? Just this?”

Hux is moaning, his mouth open against the hot push of the filth that’s pouring from Kylo’s lips. He answers Kylo only by thrusting his tongue out for a wet kiss that Kylo meets gladly, his hands bracketing Hux’s jaw to guide him through it. Hux’s arms wind around his neck and Kylo feels suddenly like he really could forgo all else and just lie inside Hux like this until sunrise, kissing him and keeping his rim stretched open wide around the base of his cock, Kylo’s balls cushioned there and throbbing, so full. 

“I deny myself this because I don’t deserve it,” Hux says when the kiss breaks, their chests heaving together, everything pressed so close and tight. “I had you, and I let you go.” 

“What?” Kylo can’t think about anything so abstract while his cock is this snugly engaged. “What you talking about, I’m-- here, aren’t I?”

That it feels like a real question, and something he must look to Hux to tell him, comes as a surprise and speaks volumes. Hux makes a pained noise and kisses him again, softly now, threading shaking fingers through his hair. 

“It’s not really my fault or yours,” Hux says. “It was that beast from the woods. He still haunts my nightmares.”

“Don’t speak of him now,” Kylo says, horrified. “Please.” 

“I’m sorry-- Darling, my knight, forgive me. I’m so empty without you, it’s true. I get so lost, even under my father’s fucking crown, like a pitiful wanderer, until you fill me again. That must make me a whore of some kind.” 

“It makes you mine,” Kylo says, more harshly than he’d intended to. Hux clenches up tight around him as if to approve of this harshness. “Say it.”

“I’m yours,” Hux says. He’s nodding, wide-eyed as if seeing a very bright light that does not burn to look at. “Yes, I-- Feel it. Make me feel it. Show me.” 

Kylo braces his hands under Hux’s hips, tilts them upward so that his cock is already brushing the spot that makes Hux go lax with pleasure in his hands. He pulls back slow before shoving in fast. Hux cries out and nods, hands sliding across his blushing chest as if he’s searching his body for something to hold onto. Kylo grunts and fucks him harder, harder, makes him feel it.

“Say I’m yours, too,” Kylo begs when he’s close, after Hux has sobbed out his own orgasm and spread the seed all over his chest like it’s a magic potion that will fortify him. “Say it,” Kylo says when Hux’s pleasure-blurred gaze tries to focus on his. “Please, I need--” 

“You’re mine.” Hux sits up on his elbows, yanks Kylo down to him and brings their faces together. “Aren’t you?” he says much more softly, whispering this against Kylo’s cheek. 

“ _Yes_ , Hux--” 

Two more sharp, shallow thrusts and Kylo is coming hard inside Hux, where he wants to entirely disappear. Emptying himself into his beloved husband, the only person living who really knows him, feels so close to blissful dissolution that he’s calm for a while afterward, dumped onto Hux’s spent body and letting Hux touch his hair, even though Hux has come on his fingers. 

“I have to tell you something,” Kylo says when he finally pulls out, sitting back to watch his come seeping out while Hux just lies there, almost asleep and so surrendered, waiting for Kylo to gather him under the blankets. But it’s now or never. 

“Something about what?” Hux already looks suspicious, worry pulling at his features again. 

“Snoke. My master.” 

“Your former master,” Hux says, frowning now. 

“Let me-- we should clean up first. Stay there.” 

“Where else would I go?” 

Hux sits up and rubs at his face. He’s moaning under his breath, bracing himself, but he confessed about not really wanting to be Emperor and Kylo feels now like some part of him knew already. Perhaps Hux will have a similar reaction to Kylo’s news about Snoke and the door in his mind.

Kylo brings fine towels from Hux’s washroom, scented with some fragrance he can’t place by the servants who see to Hux’s laundry. The scent will linger on Kylo’s skin when he returns to his own room, or until he rises from Hux’s bed at dawn to go to the volcano, or maybe he will still be smelling these soft, sweet perfumes when he leaves this place with Hux forever at daybreak. 

“You’re making me anxious,” Hux says, watching Kylo and remaining stiff in his shoulders as Kylo settles beside him on the bed again, having picked at least most of Hux’s crusted come out of his hair. “Perhaps we should sleep now and you should tell me old stories about your master tomorrow, after our victory.” 

“I must tell you now. It’s relevant to the weapon.” 

“Oh.” Hux flinches and looks away, then back to him. “Say it, then.”

“I never told you how he found me.”

“Yes, you did. In the woods, when you were alone there as a boy.” 

“That’s true, but I didn’t tell you why I was there. And that he was more than a teacher to me.” 

“More?” Hux makes a startled, aggrieved face. “How do you mean?”

“Rey came from the woods.” Kylo has told Hux this before; he’s not sure Hux believed it then. “A magic baby of unknown origin. My uncle’s husband found her crying alone when he was hunting for mushrooms.” 

“You’ve told me already.” 

“And I’ve told you how her arrival-- disrupted my childhood.” Kylo’s mouth quirks. It feels strange even now to admit this to anyone but Snoke, who stoked young Ben’s insecurities like coaxing a bonfire from embers, so easily. “But I didn’t tell you why, exactly. Her powers were stronger than mine, even though she was younger than me. She could do things so easily, and everyone loved her, just as they were beginning to find me difficult and disappointing. They could see by then that I was different from them, while she, this baby from the fucking woods, was so like them, so happy to be among them whereas I often shrunk into sulking isolation.” 

“I’d guessed as much,” Hux says. He reaches over to touch Kylo’s cheek: tenderly, with forgiveness and sympathy. “So Snoke took advantage of a little boy’s despairing envy, by inviting you to become his pupil. Further isolating you.” 

“Yes. But he wasn’t just giving me instructions. He was giving me power, literal power, transferring it into me. Infusing me with it, as my secret ally. It made my powers comparable to Rey’s, sometimes far stronger. As I grew older Snoke’s partnership helped me preserve peace in my family’s lands. He helped me fight your family’s armies when they came through the woods. No one could defeat us there-- I lead our warriors, I was given credit. But it was Snoke, working through me.” 

“Maybe he said so,” Hux says, and he scoffs. His hand is still soft on Kylo’s cheek, his eyes still infused with the same promises Kylo saw there when he was covered in Han’s blood: determination, indulgence, possessive intent. Nothing takes them from each other as long as Hux has a say. “You’re still very powerful without him, here,” Hux says. “So he must have been lying to you about your need of his help. He wanted to snap your head off and suck your soul from your neck, I could feel it. You escaped his reach just in time.” 

“Not in time for my father to survive,” Kylo says, steeling himself to say the rest.

“Well, no. But that horror was what it took to break Snoke’s hold on you.” 

“That and having a real ally at last. Having you, at last.” 

“Yes.” Hux draws him down into a kiss. Kylo shouldn’t allow himself to sink into it but can’t make himself pull free, wants to hide from the truth inside the warmth of Hux’s mouth. “I know you’re worried about tomorrow,” Hux whispers. “But don’t let the memory of that ghoul’s lies shake your confidence. I’ve seen you do amazing things here, far from him and his bloody woods.” 

“I’m not so far.” Kylo sits up. He watches Hux’s face, though he wishes he could look away and not witness the moment when Hux finally hears what he’s really saying. “He-- That day when I killed Han. When you came to help me and we made our escape. Snoke threatened to kill you, too. He was there in the woods, watching as you tried to comfort me. He said I was growing too attached to you, too distracted. That I would have to pledge myself to him anew or he would help me to free myself of you the way I had freed myself of my father.” 

“No-- What?” Hux rolls onto his side and reaches for Kylo as if he wants to pull him back down into the cozy lie they’ve lived in for so long. “I was there with you, I heard no threats from Snoke.” 

“Yes, but we escaped his realm so easily, didn’t we? In the woods, he had a way of speaking to me that others would not hear. And now he has that access to me wherever I go. I pledged to let him have it in order to spare your life that day. It all took place in whispers in my mind, even as you led me away by the hand. He told me to keep it a secret from you and I did. Fearing what would happen to you if I didn’t.” 

“I don’t understand.” Hux’s eyes change as he says so, hardening. “What are you-- Telling me, what-- That you didn’t forsake Snoke when we left the woods?”

“I wanted to, Hux, but I couldn’t. He would have killed you, I know it.” 

“So what was the alternative? What have you given up, what are you saying?”

“He can speak to me now from very far away. He’s spoken to me all this time, he’s the one who showed me how to control the weapon. How we’ll control it together, me and Snoke.”

“Where is he?” Hux scrambles away as if Snoke is going to spring from Kylo’s chest. He scoots across the mattress and then tumbles out of the bed entirely. When he gets to his feet his expression is stricken; his face has gone pale. “Where are you hiding that monster?”

“Nowhere, it’s just that we’re still connected, even with me here and him there. I’m sorry. I can’t get free of him, Hux. I don’t think going to him in the woods was ever as much as a choice as I told myself it was--”

“What have you done?” Hux’s eyes are wide now. He’s backing from the bed, naked and shivering. “You’ve bound up our fates with that thing? That demon?”

“You knew I had already. When I killed Han. That ruined everything, I-- I ruined everything, that day. You’ve known it. It’s made you hate me here, more often than not.” 

“But you were-- You were done with him.” Hux’s back hits the far wall and he braces his hands against it. “With Snoke, you said--”

“I lied to you. Snoke asked me to, so I did. To protect you, Hux. This has been my burden alone, and tomorrow I’ll use it-- Unless-- If you don’t want to be Emperor, and I don’t want to use the weapon--”

“Now you don’t want to use the weapon?” Hux’s lip rises. His eyes narrow. He reaches for the drape hanging near his right arm and pulls it over his nakedness. “Now you’ll leave me stranded without control of the weapon and-- What? Go back to Snoke? Warn your people of the forthcoming attack?”

“No! But I thought you and I, maybe, together, we could go away--”

“With Snoke residing in your head? In your body? Where is he? Where is he _right now_?”

“In the woods, where he’s always been. But also-- In me now, always, too. I think it would take killing him to undo our connection.” 

“And you require a connection with him to control the weapon?”

“Yes, I-- I didn’t inherit as much power as I seemed to. It was him, since I was a boy. Augmenting me. Requiring dark ceremonies in the woods to instill in me powers I could take back to the village. He would make me so cold--” 

“But you made your choice.” Hux lets go of the drape and puts his shoulders back, swallows. “And you kept with him even over me. Why tell me now? Why not go on pretending that you serve only me?” 

“Because it’s ruining you for me. Or me, for you-- As if you already knew, as if some part of you always has--”

“I assure you, I did not.” Hux crosses the room and picks up his nightshirt with urgency, as if it’s a weapon he’ll use to hold Kylo at a distance. He puts it on, breathing heavily, then turns back to the bed. “There’s only one thing to do,” he says. “Tomorrow we will use the weapon and destroy what remains of the dissidents who deny my rule. With Snoke’s help, if you say we need it. If he’s allowed me to be Emperor for so long, perhaps my rule poses no threat to his own power. Not the way what you and I once had threatened him, it seems. As long as he has you wholly to himself, sullied and servile, I’ll be free to do as I like. Have I got it right now?” 

“You’re upset about the lie,” Kylo says, firming up his voice to match Hux’s unyielding tone. “But you don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“I would like not to, but the cards on the the table now. I cannot believe what you’re saying ever again. Perhaps you’re lying even now. Get out, leave my sight. I need to think.” 

“But if you don’t really want to be Emperor--” 

“I am Emperor here because there is nothing else for me in this world!” Hux is shouting now, hands in fists. “Once there was a life I wanted more than anything, in a house near the woods with a husband who could warm bathwater and light candles with his bare hands, but it was all a trick, a _lie_ , as you’ve just told me. I might have known, since it was also flimsy enough to disappear the moment I tried to grasp it and hold it. Get out of my bedchamber, I can’t bear the sight of you. It’s as if you were always some rotten puppet of his, fooling everyone who thought you were a real person. A magic person, even.”

“But--”

“And your eleventh hour attempt to save your family from the weapon does not impress me. Either betray me fully by leaving me and going to them or accept that they would not want you back anyway and resign yourself to pretending to be my servant for the rest of your life. Thank you for telling me who you actually serve. Alas, your confession is not enough to sway me from my plans to use the weapon. In the morning you will either help me do so or destroy what’s left of me by abandoning me to a failed operation that will result in my swift dethroning and execution here.”

“You’re upset,” Kylo says, sliding out of bed. “Once you’ve had time to think--” 

“What would you have me think about?” Hux shouts, throwing out his arms. His face is red, and the corners of his eyes have grown pink. “You’ve just told me that you’re lost to me, that I never had you at all--”

“No! You did have me-- You do! That’s why Snoke asked me to deceive you. That’s why I’ve had to keep you safe from him, because--” 

“Because you’re not powerful enough to simply kill him?” 

Kylo drops his gaze to the floor. His spent cock looks ridiculous, hanging soft between his legs. _You’d give up real power in service of that thing?_ Snoke asked him once, sneering as if there was nothing lower. Kylo had boiled with shame. 

“I told you,” he says, crouching down to pick up his pants. “I was never as powerful as I should have been. It’s almost always been Snoke. Of course I can’t kill him. He supplies my power, through our connection.” 

“Then you’re useless to me without him,” Hux says. His lips are shaking, nostrils flaring, but his eyes are very hard and unblinking.

Kylo leaves the room. He’s been cleaved in half; it makes no sense that he can even stay on his feet. But he gets through the door and uses his powers to slam it hard behind him. More so than ever, his use of magic feels like jagged claws scraping down his back. He sinks to his knees near his bed and listens to the anguished weeping that Hux attempts to muffle in a pillow or perhaps with his hands. When he can no longer hear Hux crying he stands and goes to the door, ready to take a thousand more abuses if he can just comfort Hux for a moment.

The door is locked. Kylo steps backward as if the handle has burned him. He could open the lock easily with his powers, or kick down the door without them. Hux knows this. The locking of the door was not a practical maneuver but a principled statement. A message. 

Kylo dresses in his full costume: mask, helmet, heavy black cape. With his sword strapped to his back, he leaves the Emperor’s palace under the cover of night and for the last time, heading for the volcano.

**

The volcano is called Mustafar in both the east and the west. Kylo isn’t sure which culture named it, but as he stands looking down at its agitated lava at sunrise he feels as if the rage it contains is a living thing, a kind of god that named itself. 

Back at the Imperial Palace, Hux will be readying the traveling party. He may have just realized that Kylo is gone, or perhaps he came through the door between their rooms much earlier, as Kylo made his way here on horseback in the night. Hux won’t be able to confess to the others that he can’t control the weapon without Kylo; they don’t even believe Kylo to be alive. The weapon is supposed to rely solely on Hux’s genius, and it stands as a symbol of his unimpeachable power as ruler. Conversely, its failure would evidence Hux’s inadequacy and betrayal of his people. So he will have to ride here thinking Kylo has abandoned him and that he is riding to his own disgrace, to his death. 

When Hux arrives with his convoy and finds Kylo here he will either feel relief or renewed despair. Kylo feels too cut off from his connection to Hux to know what he’ll feel ever again. He reaches out for Snoke for the tenth or perhaps hundredth time since he left the Palace and hears nothing in answer. 

Instead, another familiar voice calls out to him, coming from the arched entryway to the long, narrow rock outcropping he stands upon within the volcano. 

“Ben!” 

His mother’s voice slices through him just as Hux’s had the night before, when he called Kylo useless. Being called _Ben_ , by her, in that tone, feels much the same. He turns to her, still wearing his helmet and mask, his vision tunneling to her face as she walks forward. She looks angry, wears a dagger on her hip, but when she’s standing only a few feet away from him her face changes. There is relief in her eyes at the sight of him. And pity.

“Take that off,” she says. “Let me see you.” 

For a moment Kylo doesn’t know what she means. It’s been twelve years since he showed his face to anyone but Hux. As soon as he understands what she’s asking him to do, he reaches for the clasps on the helmet. As if she’ll withhold dessert after dinner if he dares disobey. He did not expect to be glad if he ever saw her again, and his gladness is unsettling, mixing with his fear and horror and roiling in his gut. 

Leia draws in a sharp breath when she sees his unmasked face. He’s not sure why she should; he looks much the same as he did when he left home. Perhaps she’s only forgotten. She steps closer, and Kylo takes a step back, closer to the edge of the platform they’re standing upon. 

“What are you doing here?” she asks, her voice tightening with every word. “The site of your grandfather’s disfigurement. Do you mean to repeat his mistake?” 

“I will not.” Kylo’s voice is thick; he doesn’t even know what he means by this statement. Not yet, not until Snoke or Hux tells him what to do next. “I am stronger than grandfather was when he came here.” 

“I would not be so sure of that.” 

“Do not call me weak!” Kylo glowers at her and steps forward. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t reach for her dagger. “You shall soon see the truth.” 

“I have learned the truth, in your absence. Rey told me you led her into the woods as a girl. That you told her to wait for her, that you would come back, that you never did. She wasn’t going to tell any of us, Ben, she meant to keep your secret. She forgave you, because you were so young when it happened.”

“Did she finally tell you the truth because I killed my father when I was not so young?” 

“Yes.” Leia looks away, at the boiling lava below. Her eyes are hard when she turns to Kylo again, but not cold. “Why? Because Snoke asked it of you?”

Kylo stumbles backward in surprise. Leia moves toward him, reaching out as if she wants to pull him away from the edge. 

“You know of Snoke?” Kylo says, freezing in place.    
“Rey and Luke tell me that he’s a very old demon who lives in the woods. That he has leached his powers from magic-using children for generations. And that only one of his victims can find him and therefore destroy him.”

“Lies,” Kylo hisses. “No one living could destroy him. Least of all me. You remember how I struggled. How I didn’t live up to your expectations in the use of my powers, even when that _foundling_ did so handily while she still toddled.”  

“You were strong before Snoke found you, only so insecure. We all told you the same things Snoke did, that you could control your powers if only you believed it, but you didn’t want to listen when we said it. I was so blind-- I thought Rey’s arrival had helped you, inspired you. But it awakened a kind of hatred in you, and Snoke fed it.” 

“You misunderstand, as ever. He made me powerful.”

“He lies to you! You must know it, even if you want to deny it. Come home with me and help Rey and Luke destroy him. Leave this place before the eruption destroys you instead.” 

“It wouldn’t! Snoke will help me control it--”

“He wants you here to die! He’s afraid of you, because you have the power to defeat him. Why do you think that he asked you to kill your father? So that you would truly be alone.”

“I’m not alone.” He is now, but she doesn’t know it. “I have Hux.”

“Hux.” Leia’s hand twitches as if she wants to grab her dagger. “That monster has all but wiped us out. Your own people.”

“They never felt like my people. And he’s my monster, just as I am his. We belong to each other.” 

“He shares you with Snoke?” 

Kylo shows his teeth. Leia makes no sign of backing down. 

“Where is Hux now?” Leia asks. “I see you here, preparing to do his dirty work. Where is the great Emperor while you stand over the pit of fire that destroyed your grandfather?”

“He’s coming,” Kylo says, wondering if this is also true of Snoke. His silence in Kylo’s mind may indicate that he’s aware of Kylo’s betrayal. Kylo didn’t feel Snoke’s presence when he spoke of the door in his mind to Hux, but perhaps his disobedience was so great that Snoke will have sensed it from his place in the woods.

“I can see the fear on your face,” Leia says. “And the doubt. Ben, you’re so alone here. Come with me.”

“It’s too late.” He thinks of Rey, of Luke, can’t imagine ever being among them again. 

“I won’t let you do this to yourself,” Leia says. The backward step she takes hurts; Kylo doesn’t want her to give up, even now. “I’ve not come alone.” 

Rey steps into view, standing in the arched entryway. Her face is calm but her sword is drawn. 

“Cousin,” she says when Kylo reaches for his own sword. 

“You brought her here to kill me?” Kylo asks, his teeth grit when he looks again to his mother. This is his worst nightmare, come to life at last. 

“Not to kill you,” Leia says. She looks older now, Kylo realizes, and so tired. “But if you won’t listen to me, I’ll have Rey use her powers to bring you home. To restrain you. I’ll take you home in chains if I have to, but I am taking you home, Ben.” 

“You’ll take me home in a coffin if you take me home at all.” Kylo slides his gaze back to Rey and swings his sword forward with a twirl. “I still have Snoke’s power,” he shouts, straining to feel it and fearing that he can’t. “What have you to match it, foundling?”

“Come and find out,” Rey says, lifting her sword. 

Kylo runs at her, thinking with renewed fury of the day he lead her into the woods. She had been so trusting, holding his hand and smiling up at him, asking him where they were going. Snoke had told Kylo to push her over the cliff at the edge of the woods. Kylo couldn’t do it, and he went trembling to Snoke’s cave after leaving Rey alone in a meadow, thinking he would face harsh recrimination for his failure. When Snoke asked if ‘it’ was done, Kylo said yes. Snoke must have known he was lying; he knows all that goes on in his woods. But he did nothing. 

“He wanted us to be enemies!” Rey says, her teeth grit as she meets a powerful blow from Kylo’s sword with her own, the blades clanging and then pressing together, trembling. “Snoke killed my parents and brought me to that clearing with the mushrooms, just outside your village.”

“What?” Kylo is unsteadied by this, but only briefly; he shoves against her blade. She holds her ground. “How do you know this?”

“I know _many_ things now, Kylo Ren. Snoke did it so that I would be found by your people.” Rey’s eyes soften even as she presses harder against Kylo’s advance. “So that you would hate me and see me as a rival-- So he could have you.”

“Deceitful wench!” Kylo twirls away before advancing again, slashing at her wildly. She blocks his attack with a growl. “You only want your revenge!” 

“I’ve only ever wanted to help you! I could have exposed you when Luke brought me back. I thought you’d found happiness with a husband, that you had changed. And then--” 

She grunts and throws the full force of her power against him, an invisible blow that knocks him backward before he gathers himself and resists with his own power, steadying his feet. He doubles his efforts, letting the hate that Snoke taught him to embrace flow through every part of him, and manages to knock Rey through the archway and away from the volcano’s interior. She staggers down the slope, loses her footing and then springs up again, still retreating, her eyes locked on Kylo’s as he marches toward her. Leia hangs back, and as Kylo charges forward, sensing the fear in Rey as he accesses his full power, he wonders if he could kill Rey now when he could not do so as a child, when he’d hated her so much more than he can manage to here. Just as he’s finally landed a glancing blow against her, cutting her left shoulder with the blade of his sword, there’s an outraged cry from behind some mounded rocks and a flaming arrow comes streaking through the sky. 

_Master_ , Kylo thinks, and it’s as if the invocation freezes him. The arrow strikes his right side, searing into him with a flaming steel tip. No help comes from Snoke.

Rey charges forward, snarling. Kylo uses his powers to put out the fire that threatens to consume his robe while he pulls the arrow from his side with his hand. The pain consumes him, blanking his vision, and when he blinks his eyes clear he’s met with Rey’s sword across his face, then his shoulder. He stumbles again and collapses, thinking himself truly blinded until he blinks the blood from his eyes and sees Rey’s boots on the snow-dusted mountainside. Perhaps the fear he sensed from her was only her own wondering if she will be able to kill him. 

“Give up this pointless resistance,” Rey says. She’s holding her bleeding shoulder, breathing hard, sword at her side. “Come with us and destroy Snoke. Only you can locate him. You can still help your people.” 

As if to dispute this, the ground beneath them begins to rumble. The eruption is beginning.

Kylo gets to his feet with some difficulty, watching as Rey staggers backward and the entire universe seems to tremble, untethered. He remembers his mother and looks up toward the overhang where they stood before, but she’s gone. Cracks begin to form in the mountainside, splitting down from the crater and ripping the rock apart, sending debris rolling downward. Kylo starts up the volcano’s slope in dragging steps, thinking of his mother. Rey darts for the small group that waits for her, in the direction that the arrow came from. Kylo recognizes his father’s childhood friend, a tall warrior who holds a bow and arrow, snarling. A young man with dark skin reaches for Rey as she runs into his arms. Kylo is relieved to spot Leia making her way toward them until he realizes what it means: they’re giving up on him. The very earth between them is opening, forming a wide crevasse that lava will soon race through. 

Leia meets Kylo’s eyes while the others hurry for the base of the volcano. He turns away from her, runs. 

He makes it to the forest at the foot of the mountain just before the initial explosion of brilliant red. Unable to resist, he turns back to watch it rocket into the sky, untamed. 

_Master_ , he begs, though he knows he will hear no response. The door in his mind only opens one way, and Snoke has abandoned him. Perhaps his mother was right: perhaps Snoke led Kylo here to die. Perhaps he once made the same promise to Kylo’s grandfather and left him here alone, powerless at the foot of the monster. 

When the lava begins to flow down the cracks in the mountain, Kylo feels the pain from his injuries anew, as if burned by the sight. His horse has fled. He might be able to get clear of the destruction on foot if he ran as fast as he could, but he sees no reason to and his body is giving up already, blood flowing from the wound on his side and across his face, which feels as if it’s been cleaved in two. He waits for his nose to fall off, waits to die choking on his own blood as it pours into his mouth with every gasping breath he takes. 

After tripping half-heartedly along the unsettled terrain for some dizzy paces, he collapses into the snow. He can smell the lava, the ash. Everything burning, just as he always knew it would, only he thought he would still have Hux with him when it did. Hux will arrive with his traveling party just in time to see the volcano erupting in the distance, providing ample evidence that Hux was lying to everyone about his ingenious methods of controlling it. This will be evidence enough to doom the disgraced Emperor to a violent uprising in the East, one which will surely result in his death. Perhaps Hux, too, will welcome it. Kylo closes his burning eyes, spits blood in a drooling stream and imagines he can hear Snoke laughing from behind the tightly shut door in his mind as the last of Kylo’s fading resolve pounds its weak, useless fists against it, unanswered. 

He doesn’t hear the hoofbeats over the noise of the crashing destruction that thunders down from the volcano and shakes the ground, and when he hears Hux calling his name he thinks perhaps he has already died. 

Then there is a much softer quake in the earth just beside him: Hux’s boots, the weight of Hux pressing against him, Hux’s hands on his shoulders. When Kylo opens his blood-stuck eyes there is pain, so much of it and from so many different sources that he knows he must be alive and that Hux must somehow really be here holding him. Hux is pale with shock, his shaking hand pressed over the wound on Kylo’s side. 

“You-- You’re--” Hux’s voice is smaller than Kylo has ever heard it. His cheeks are pink, his hair wild. “You’re here,” he says when he pushes the blood-wet hair from Kylo’s face. “You’re here, what happened--” 

“The eruption.” 

“Ah-- Yes, that.” Hux looks up and sniffs the air like a fox calculating the odds of escaping from the predators that have cornered him, his eyes bright with fear and with a defiance that crystallizes against it. “Can you stand?” he asks when he looks back to Kylo. 

Kylo can, with Hux’s help. He limps to Hux’s horse, the fastest and smartest horse in the East and possibly all the world; she’s spooked by the eruption but not yet to the point of bolting. Kylo slumps against her and uses whatever’s left of his meagre, unaugmented powers to calm her, or maybe he’s just stroking her madly as Hux guides him up onto her back. 

“Will you be able to hold onto me?” Hux asks, already climbing on in front of Kylo and grabbing the reins. 

“Yes,” Kylo says, wanting to believe this more than ever. He swallows a scream when he wraps his arms around Hux, the wound on his side pulling in a way that makes him feel as if he’s taken a second arrow. He’s soaked in blood and sweat, huffing in agony against Hux’s neck as they ride away from the volcano toward the neutral zone, westward. But Hux is here, and even as the lava surges down through the cracks that the eruption has split into the earth, even as they have no kingdom left to ride back to in the east or the west, even as Kylo finds himself abandoned by Snoke and bested by Rey, all is not lost. Hux is here, and they are in motion. 

“Who did this you?” Hux asks after they’ve crossed the river that marks the boundary of the volcano’s reach. He reaches back to jostle Kylo, possibly to make sure he’s still alive. “Did you hear me?” he asks. “Who injured you?” 

“My cousin.” 

“So you tried to go back and they attacked you. I might have known.” 

“No-- Hux. I went to the volcano. I was-- Thinking. They came.” 

“To kill you?”

“To capture me and take me home in chains.” 

Hux yanks on the reins and turns the horse back toward the volcano. They’re in the weedy plains past the river, well out of reach of the lava’s flow. It feels impossible to Kylo, like some magic Hux has performed, when really he only came on horseback and rode Kylo to safety. That Hux came for him at all feels like a miracle now, with Kylo’s blood-soaked face on Hux’s shoulder. Hux watches as the eruption continues, his breath choppy and his muscles tense within Kylo’s grip. Kylo is drooping toward incoherence, pulled in on himself by pain and barely able to lift his chin to observe the bright ribbons of fire down the volcano’s slope. 

“I suppose I came here to chain and reclaim you myself,” Hux says. “Though I left the palace telling myself I would kill you.”  

“You left alone?”

“Of course. I knew I was doomed when I saw you had gone.” 

“How did you know I would be here?” 

“I didn’t.” Hux turns the horse westward again and spurs her on. “I hardly knew where I was going at all. Maybe I intended to throw myself into the volcano. But then there you were. I felt as if something was calling to me. I assumed it was my own fate.” 

“I am your fate.” Kylo squeezes Hux and thinks of their ride west after the marriage ceremony, along the main road. Here they are in the same positions, only also completely reversed. “I called to you,” Kylo says. “I thought I was reaching out to Snoke. But I wanted help, real help. I must have reached you instead. The only person who--” He breaks off from voicing his assumption that Hux still loves him, even though it must be true. Kylo would not be upon this horse if it was not.

“Oh, yes,” Hux says, and Kylo can feel the shift in his jaw when he clenches it. “I am all too aware that you are my fate.” 

He doesn’t sound happy about it, but when they reach cover in a canyon in the neutral zone Hux handles him with care, helping him from the horse and settling him against a shaded portion of the canyon wall. Night is coming on, the sun sinking. Hux has a small pack from which he produces a canteen. He drinks first, then passes it to Kylo. 

“Let’s see,” Hux says, kneeling before him and reaching for the wound on his side. Kylo has used what’s left of his powers to stanch the bleeding as much as possible, but he’s growing weak and the effort is wearing him down further. Hux makes a disapproving noise as he carefully peels back the layers of Kylo’s clothing. “Burns?” he says. 

“A flaming arrow.” 

“Your cousin shot you?”

“No. An old friend of my father’s. Rey cut my face.”

Hux looks up at the gash on Kylo’s face as he shrugs off his coat. He stuffs the coat against Kylo’s side and reaches for Kylo’s cheek, stopping short of touching him. Kylo can only imagine how hideous he must look, his face ripped apart into something monstrous. Hux takes a clean shirt from his bag, dumps water onto it and uses it to clean the blood from Kylo’s brow, then from the bridge of his nose. Kylo grits his teeth against the pain of this contact, the warmth of his gratitude and surprise dulling it somewhat.  

“You brought a change of clothes and a canteen of water on your trip to throw yourself into the volcano?” Kylo says. 

Hux snarls at him. “Shut up.” 

“I know you have a plan,” Kylo says, wanting this to sound like an apology. His eyes sting; the salt of his tears will burn in his wound. “You always have a plan, Hux.” 

“Perhaps I do. Your role in it involves living until morning. Will you?”

“Yes,” Kylo says. He reaches for Hux, who moves away from him. “Hux--”

“Quiet. Just be quiet.” Hux’s voice has gotten thick. He rummages through his bag, and Kylo notices a tarp strapped to the back of the horse as well. “I thought-- when I saw you lying there-- You looked dead.” 

“I felt death closing around me. Or something worse. The lack of you. I thought I’d lost you.” 

“Because of what I said? Because I locked my door? That’s all it took for you to abandon me?”

“Those were not such small things. In my view.” 

Hux keeps his back to Kylo but goes still, both hands in his bag. His shoulders move with his breath, which is coming heavily again. There’s thunder in the distance. Hux looks up at the sky and curses under his breath. 

“Where is Snoke now?” he asks. 

“In the woods. He didn’t come to my aid when Rey attacked.” 

“If I asked you to help me kill him-- Would you?”

Hux turns from the bag and meets Kylo’s eyes. He looks terrified, as if he’s waiting for Kylo to say no, that Snoke can’t be killed, and that if Kylo isn’t strong enough to defeat him then Hux certainly has no hope. 

“We should have,” Kylo says, feeling his chest hollow out with the realization even as it fills with something else. “That day. In the woods, after you’d cleaned me of my father’s blood. We should have killed Snoke then, together. I didn’t think that we could.” 

“And now?” 

“I don’t know,” Kylo confesses. 

Hux exhales slowly. He moves toward Kylo, picks up the damp shirt and uses it to gently wipe Kylo’s face where it’s started bleeding again, near his jaw. Kylo can feel the heat of his breath. For a while they’re both silent, Kylo sinking close to complete exhaustion as Hux continues to clean his face, patting the shirt very carefully against the blood there until it stops beading. 

“I have something,” Hux says when the wind picks up, bringing with it the smell of oncoming rain. “A weapon that could defeat your master. I think.” 

“What?” 

Hux reaches for his belt. From a holster there he retrieves twin daggers: one with a handle made of fine polished bone and the other of silver. Kylo recognizes them. These are the knives they used to skin and butcher the boar during their first hunt. 

“They were given to me when I married you,” Hux says. 

“Yes.” 

Kylo’s eyes snap up to Hux’s. All the pain leaves him for just a moment, a blink. It’s a powerful confirmation of what he’s beginning to understand.

“Yes?” Hux says. 

“Those could kill Snoke. If you and I wield them, together. And I know where he is.” 

They hold each other’s gaze, both searching the other for rejection or doubt. The wind ruffles through Hux’s hair. He’s disheveled and bright-eyed with fear, also with hope. To Kylo he hasn’t looked so beautiful since he was covered in boar’s blood and peering up at Kylo from his knees, so in love that he seemed to glow. Seeing it again, Kylo feels like they’ve already murdered Snoke, as if they’re back in the woods and breathing the air that will clear forever once he’s dead. 

“Rain’s coming,” Hux says. He puts the daggers away. “I’ll make you a shelter. You’ll have to regain your strength before we go to the woods and face him.” 

“And what then?” Kylo asks when Hux rises to fetch the tarp. 

“What-- when?”

“After Snoke is dead.” As if his destruction is a given. It feels certain, maybe because Kylo can sense Snoke’s panic from behind the door in his mind that Kylo has now sealed shut. It wasn’t really Snoke leaving it closed, before. Kylo severed their connection himself, when he spoke of it to Hux at last, breaking the spell. “What will become of us then?” Kylo asks when Hux only stares at him, either in confusion or hesitation. “What will you call me when it is done?” 

“Call you?”

“Your husband? Your guard? A useless menace? Your darling knight?” 

Hux makes a face as if he doesn’t like this question. He reaches for the tarp and unties it while Kylo watches. 

“We shall see,” Hux says, without meeting Kylo’s eyes. 

Hux makes a tent out of the tarp. The rain begins not long after he’s knelt beneath it with Kylo, hissing down into the canyon like a vengeful force to meet the volcano’s earlier output. It’s a powerful downpour, and Kylo is grateful that Hux had the foresight to select a high slope in the canyon for their shelter. Kylo was too disoriented when they arrived to consider anything so practical. Hux refills the canteen with rainwater while Kylo blinks in and out of a troubled sleep, everything aching. His bleeding has stopped, at least. 

When he wakes in the middle of the night, the rain has slowed to a drizzle. Hux is asleep, leaning against Kylo’s uninjured side, his head tipped back against the canyon wall. He’s frowning slightly, his lips parted. The renegade Emperor, Kylo thinks. Armitage the Invisible. He clasps Hux’s cold, slender hand inside his. 

Hux wakes at the touch, his shoulders jumping. He rolls his head toward Kylo, the frown easing from between his brows as he licks over his dry lips and seems to remember where they are, what has happened. Then he just looks astonished. 

“Good morning,” Kylo says, though the dawn has not yet come. It will, soon.

“So long since I’ve awakened with you beside me,” Hux says. His voice is achy and tired, a private sort of murmur that Kylo suspects only he has ever heard. 

Kylo shifts closer to him, wincing. Hux lifts his hand, his fingertips hovering over the cut on Kylo’s face. It still stings, and every twitch of his nose pulls at it. So does every blink, every word he speaks. He likes the feeling, though it makes him worry about how ugly he must be now. Every stabbing reminder that he is alive is a relief, as long as Hux goes on looking at him like this, touching his unmarred skin as if maybe he’s not so ugly. 

“Here were are in the wilderness again,” Hux says. 

“We’ll always be in the wilderness now,” Kylo says. There is no kingdom that would have them.

“Yes.” Hux squeezes Kylo’s hand, closes his eyes. “But there are worse places to be.” 

Kylo kisses him. It’s a timid gesture, really only the ghost of a kiss, and it hurts. Hux sighs against Kylo’s lips and laps at him softly, seeking nourishment and giving it, too. Kylo’s stomach is complaining of its emptiness, and he can hear Hux’s whining as if in answer. There’s a taste of salt and blood when their tongues slide together. By the time they pull apart to check each other’s eyes, the kiss feels like a vow they’ve made. 

“I never should have--” Hux starts to say, and Kylo kisses him again. It’s too late to list the many things they never should have done. Kylo’s list is far longer than Hux’s. Soon they will do the one thing that is desperately overdue, and Kylo at least knows there is one mistake he won’t repeat: he will never again leave any bed where Hux sleeps to follow a path that leads away from him. 

They rest until sunrise, holding onto each other and rubbing their ankles together in drowsy harmony. The feeling of closeness without the need for conversation makes Kylo think of the first weeks of their marriage, when they would linger in bed in the mornings and bask in their shared luck. They might have been speechless anyway, just like this, even if they had spoken the same language then. 

The rain stops, and the whole canyon smells of the distant fire from the volcano, the scent of scorched rock and burned woodlands blowing toward them on a cool wind. Hux checks Kylo’s wounds before going to look for firewood. He leaves Kylo the dagger with the silver handle and a sharpening stone. Kylo sets to work, every bright slice of the dagger across the stone like another fortification within his tired bones and battered but still beating heart. This modest weapon will be enough to slay the beast that for too long laid false claim to his life, because Hux gave it to him. Hux is the only one who can truly make that claim, and when this dagger pierces the oily pit where Snoke’s heart hides, the demon will learn his own mistake, and he will die knowing it.

 

**

It’s almost two full seasons after their defeat of Snoke before Kylo hears the word _husband_ again. 

They’re on the coast in the deepest southern country, where pirates and gangs rule in grisly caches here and there, always warring for territory. They’ve lived in tents since the morning they escaped the volcano, and Kylo is in no hurry to change this. He prefers it to the grand palace in the east and even to the watchful village where he grew up. Kylo’s magic keeps them safe in any structure. He’s never felt stronger, and sometimes thinks that when he plunged his dagger into Snoke alongside Hux’s he absorbed all the power that Snoke had ever stolen during his many thousands of years in the woods. It’s the kind of wicked strength that could allow its wielder to comfortably rule the whole world, but Kylo has no interest in that now.

They’re on the beach when it happens, not in their blankets inside the tent, not fucking under the sprawling blue sky as they have sometimes done, not even kissing. Hux is not speaking to Kylo but to a very tall man who is selling bunches of pale yellow fruit. The man is trying to overcharge Hux, likely because Hux looks like a prissy tourist even with a week’s worth of beard growing in, even in his patched clothing and worn boots. It’s his self-assured posture, and possibly his hair. Kylo has never seen anyone outside of the east with hair like Hux’s, and even there, to Kylo, the red-gold shine of it was a singular thing.

“Don’t mistake me for a gentleman too polite to cut the throat of a swindler,” Hux says, getting in the fruit-seller’s face even as the man towers over him. “That big brute over there is my husband,” Hux says, pointing to Kylo. “And he’s even less friendly than me.” 

“You called me a brute,” Kylo says when Hux approaches with the fruit he wanted, after paying a fair price and being cursed by the vendor. 

“Heard that, did you?” Hux sits beside Kylo in the sand and dumps the fruit into his lap before stealing a drink from the bottle of warm, flat ale that Kylo has been sipping from. Hux glances at Kylo when he passes the bottle back, and even under his sunburn Kylo can see his blush. 

“And your husband,” Kylo says, bumping his bare shoulder against Hux’s sleeve. “You called me that, too. I heard.” 

“What else would I call you?” Hux asks. He takes his time peeling some of the fruit, letting Kylo stare at him. They’re sitting in dappled shade near the tree line, under palm fronds that wave lazily in the wind off the ocean. 

“You’ve called me some other things,” Kylo says, though he should probably let it drop, lest Hux not use that word for him again. 

“Whatever else I’ve called you, you’ve always been my husband. Well, not always. Since that day in the neutral zone when you showed up shirtless to our marriage ceremony. Was that meant as a sign of disrespect to the eastern delegation?” 

“No. I wanted you to see what you were getting.” 

Hux smirks and goes on peeling, tossing the bits of peel into a pile in the sand. A wild fowl with mottled feathers emerges from the brush near the tree line and investigates the rubbish, picking up each piece of peel before tossing it away with distaste, sometimes returning to the same one again as it makes sure that none of them are something it would like to eat.

“I don’t think I understood what I was getting for many years,” Hux says. 

“Which was what?”

Hux brings a section of fruit to Kylo’s lips. His fingers almost certainly have some unseen sand on them, but Kylo opens for him and licks the fruit into his mouth, chews. 

“I don’t think there’s a word big enough for it in my language or yours,” Hux says, watching him swallow. 

“Try,” Kylo says. He likes it when Hux gets flustered while trying to voice his feelings. 

Hux rolls his eyes and pops some fruit into his own mouth. “A magic person,” he says, still chewing, “Who would dismantle the entire world and then ride away from all of it on horseback, holding onto me.” 

Someone who would hold onto you, Kylo thinks, because that is after all what he is. He slings his arm around Hux and kisses the side of his head. For a while they sit eating fruit and watching the waves break against the shore. Kylo allows himself to wonder, as he occasionally does, how the world they unmade is getting on without them. He’s heard rumors that there is peace between the East and the West, under the rule of a young and beautiful queen. He supposes that was always Rey’s destiny, and finds it hard to believe that he ever wanted any destiny for himself but his own, now that he has it: Hux under his arm, their tent waiting for them in the campground behind them, power enough to split the ocean in two but no desire to do so. All he wants from this ocean is to strip alongside Hux once the tide calms and wade in it until they walk dripping back to their tent. His powers come in handy for more modest tasks these days, such as drying their blankets after they’ve soaked them with ocean water or other things. 

“Even a magic user can find much satisfaction in a humble life,” Luke told him once. 

Kylo had found that so laughable, until the night he warmed bathwater for Hux and felt as if Hux’s satisfied smile was the most glorious victory he had yet achieved. Now he wants to instruct his younger self: be good, be good. But if he had been, he wouldn’t be here, with the person who forgives him for having been bad then, too. 

 

 

****


End file.
